The GOP ticket could still be Trump/Rubio

The 2016 presidential election has officially jumped the shark. If it were a television show, the network would axe it yesterday. I mean, a socialist revolution, a candidate under FBI investigation, and every other word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth — these storylines just aren’t believable anymore. At this rate, I expect Bill Kristol to announce that Caitlin Jenner is his real mystery third-party candidate, Vice President Joe Biden to win the Democratic nomination and Donald Trump to name his long-lost twin brother as his running mate.

{mosads}Over the weekend, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a former presidential contender, made news by signaling support for presumptive GOP nominee Trump — even going so far as saying he wants “to be helpful.”

Is Rubio now running in the vice presidential race? It’s a good explanation for why Rubio is suddenly making nice while so many other Republicans remain opposed to Trump, and it’s not far-fetched considering Ben Carson mentioned Rubio to The Washington Post as a contender last month.

Rubio told CNN anchor Jake Tapper that the door is closed because Trump “deserves a running mate that more fully embraces some of the things he stands for,” but, in reality, Trump knows he’d be better served by having a running mate who doesn’t “fully [embrace] some of the things he stands for.”

Rubio is ambitious enough that he couldn’t gut-out a whole term in the Senate before running for president, he’s surrendering his Senate seat and he never said that he would decline if Trump picked him. So, I contend that the door is wide open, and here are four reasons Rubio would be a great choice for the right side of the slash:

1. The people demand shattered glass. Everyone loves to see a glass ceiling shatter, and right now likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a monopoly on the promise of shattering a glass ceiling — and a big one: the first female president, 240 years after the Declaration of Independence and nearly 100 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The mainstream media will doubtlessly make a daily point of reminding us that a Clinton victory will be historic while a Trump victory will be a celebrity-exodus-causing tragedy of Titanic-meets-iceberg proportions.

Choosing a running mate is Trump’s opportunity to horn in on the history-making. There are several qualified vice presidential candidates who can guarantee a forecast of glass rain no matter who wins in November, and Rubio is one of them. He would be the first Hispanic ever to serve as vice president, and an olive branch to Hispanics may be smart general election politics for Trump.

2. Rubio knows what the nuclear triad is. Of course, I have no doubt Trump knows what it is too — now. I’ve never run for president before, but I can imagine when the media and the other candidates harangue you for not knowing what the nuclear triad is, you go home and google it stat.

Aside from the fact that Trump has no foreign policy credentials, the media have decided on a permanent narrative that Trump lacks the temperament to be trusted with foreign policy, so Trump must consider a vice president who has enough foreign policy clout to calm such fears. Rubio is perfect for that, given that the GOP establishment respects his voice on foreign policy, and that he currently serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

3. Él puede pedir perdón en español. I mentioned earlier that Trump will have to dig into his hopefully vast olive branch supply if he hopes to do well among Hispanics in the general election. As far as identity voting blocs go, this is the one where Trump has the most work to do. If his campaign has a mea culpa to deliver to Hispanics, whom better to deliver it than Rubio, who speaks fluent Spanish and could deliver that message in a way that likely nobody else on Trump’s short-list could. Taking down the language barrier between himself and Hispanics by adding Rubio to the ticket would give Trump a tremendous advantage.

4. O, establishment, take from me this olive branch. Trump won the Republican primary by alienating the establishment and the neoconservative wings of the party. Now, those two widely overlapping groups are the linchpins of the #NeverTrump movement. Having Rubio on the ticket would likely force some in the movement to go from #NeverTrump to #MaybeTrump. The establishment will love his face as the future of the party, and the neoconservatives will find his slightly-too-interventionist ideas on foreign policy to be almost-interventionist-enough.

Could it be possible that Trump would do something as un-outrageous as adding Rubio to his presidential ticket? That instead of Trump/Mark Cuban, Trump/Kim Kardashian, or Trump/”Duck Dynasty,” we might end up with Trump/Rubio?

But choosing Marco Rubio would be a smart, conventional move for Donald Trump, which almost definitely means he’ll do something different that inexplicably works out better.

Zipperer is assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College.