Donald Trump plans to announce his running mate on Monday, Fox News reported after speaking with the former president.
“He did confirm that he’s going to make a VP choice today,” Fox’s Bret Baier said on the network’s air just hours before the first day of the Republican National Convention was set to kick off.
Baier clarified that Trump’s decision will be revealed sometime later Monday. “Yes, yeah. We’re going to get a VP today,” Baier said.
Trump also told Baier, “there’s other surprises to come,” the news anchor reported.
The long-running race by a swarm of Republican hopefuls to join Trump at the top of the ticket has likely been whittled down to three top contenders: Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Vance and Rubio both were once vocal Trump critics. Vance in 2016 had called Trump a “total fraud,” while Rubio had slammed Trump as a “con artist” while running against him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
Burgum ran against Trump in the current presidential primary cycle, though he largely avoided directly criticizing the ex-president at that time.
All three men have become aggressive cheerleaders for Trump as the veepstakes heated up.
Vance and Burgum, for instance, both appeared outside of Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York City to decry the prosecution of the presumptive Republican nominee.
After the jury in that trial convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records, Rubio compared the whole affair to show trials carried out in Cuba under the communist regime of Fidel Castro.
Trump’s VP announcement is scheduled to come in the midst of a deluge of major national news — most recently a failed assassination attempt against the former president at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend.
The attack, which left one rally attendee dead and Trump with a minor injury, sent shockwaves across the country and spurred condemnations of political violence across the political aisle.
President Joe Biden, in an Oval Office address after the Trump rally shooting, urged Americans to lower the temperature of political rhetoric and reaffirm the democratic norms of civil disagreement and decency.
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