OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former First Lady Melania Trump has kept a relatively low profile since her husband launched his 2024 campaign to serve a second term in the White House, but according to a new report, she has a short-list favorite to become his running mate.
According to an exclusive report from Axios examining who former President Donald Trump may want in his “loyalty-first Cabinet,” Melania believes one-time Fox News star Tucker Carlson should become her husband’s running mate.
“Here’s an interesting twist: Melania Trump is an advocate for picking Tucker Carlson, the booted Fox News star. She thinks Carlson would make a powerful onstage extension of her husband, a source close to Trump told us. The former first lady has made few campaign appearances this time around, but a Trump-Carlson ticket might encourage her to hit the trail,” the outlet reported.
Axios added, “However, many people close to Trump have dismissed the idea of Tucker Carlson because they believe he would never choose someone who could surpass him. And Trump’s staff is convinced (correctly) that Carlson can’t be controlled. But the two men talk a lot.”
Last month, New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman, during an interview with host Jamie Weinstein for an episode of The Dispatch Podcast, talked about how the former president plans to fill his new administration with devoted supporters if he wins a second term. Because of this, Weinstein asked Haberman what he thought about rumors that Trump might choose Carlson to be his vice president.
“It’s a real thing that I am hearing as a possibility,” Haberman said. “The likelihood of it, I don’t know. I think there will be a pretty professional vetting process, honestly. I know that might sound unbelievable based on what we’ve seen from Trump historically, but Trump’s current political team is the best—at least as a non-incumbent—that he’s had, and there’s just a different level of control.”
While Haberman continued to speak about Carlson as a potential Trump VP pick, she noted that “the risk with Tucker Carlson and Trump is that Tucker Carlson’s a very big star in his own right, and I’m not sure how Trump would contend with that.”
Earlier in the month, Trump indicated he’d consider Carlson as a potential running mate.
“I like Tucker a lot; I guess I would,” Trump said during an appearance on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “I think I’d say I would because he’s got great common sense. You know, when they say that you guys are conservative, or I’m conservative — it’s not that we’re conservative; we have common sense. We want to have safe borders. We want to have a wall because walls work.”
But that said, Carlson, during an event later in November, made a startling prediction about the 2024 election, telling an audience that he doesn’t believe President Joe Biden and Trump will face off against each other again.
By referring to Biden as “senile,” Carlson claimed he wasn’t being cruel, but it was “just true.” He went on to say that while Trump is dealing with 90 or more charges stemming from four separate indictments, Biden is losing ground to Trump in the polls.
“Take the opponent out of the race, and they’re still losing,” he noted. “So, I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen. This is not going to be a race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I would bet my beloved fishing camp in Maine that that is not going to happen. That’s not going to happen.”
“So what will happen?” he asked. “Well, I don’t know. One of, like, 400 distinct other possibilities… pick one.”
“These issues will be forced,” he said. “Soon. Like, in a year. And the road from here to November 2024 is going to be filled with developments nobody in this room could foresee; I can promise you that. So, it’s about to get very serious, for sure. Only the leadership of the world is at stake, which is also, by the way, we now know, the most lucrative possible franchise in human history.”
At that, Carlson asked the audience to let their imaginations “run wild” for a moment.
“What wouldn’t they do?” he asked. “What haven’t they done? What might they do next? How will you prepare yourself for that? Take this seriously. As much as you want to retreat and pretend ‘everything is fine, sit down,’ it’s not fine, okay?”
