Reportedly, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump wanted the president to run with a vice presidential nominee other than Mike Pence for the 2020 election. Specifically, according to the new memoir from Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, Jared and Ivanka “favored” replacing Pence with the Trump administration’s now former Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley. Jared and Ivanka’s alleged support of this plan to replace Pence with Haley may have been a rare moment of actual political foresight on their part, because now that the 2020 general election approaches, polls make it abundantly clear that the Trump-Pence ticket is, actually, in trouble.
Discussing a trip that the former national security adviser took with the president around Christmas 2018, Bolton wrote:
‘Trump also raised the widespread political rumor he would dump Pence from the ticket in 2020 and run instead with Haley, asking what I thought. White House gossip was common that Ivanka and Kushner favored this approach, which tied in with Haley’s leaving her position as UN Ambassador in December 2018, thus allowing her to do some politicking around the country before being named to the ticket in 2020. The political argument in Haley’s favor was that she could win back women voters alienated from Trump. By contrast, it was said, the evangelicals supporting Pence had nowhere else to go in 2020, so their votes were not at risk if Haley took his place.’
In the time since the late 2018 conversation that Bolton mentions, Trump insisted to reporters that Pence would, in fact, be his running mate for 2020. As he put it to Fox Business in June of last year:
‘We won, we won together. We have tremendous evangelical support. We have tremendous support from every angle. You can’t break up a team like that.’
Yet, it seems like the voters may be sick of that supposedly ready-for-winning team. As of Monday afternoon, Biden leads Trump by an average of a staggering 9.5 percent in polls on the national level, according to RealClearPolitics. The problem, of course, is Trump, who consistently proves that his strategy of belligerently ranting his way through the presidency has deadly consequences — after all, over 120,000 Americans have died from the Coronavirus, which he’s frequently refused to take seriously. He’s dragged his feet big time on working to procure supplies for the fight against the virus.
