Trump: ‘Marco has this residency problem.’
Inside the move to maneuver Marco Rubio into the VP slot.
DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN STAFF has assembled a dozen dossiers on possible running mates, but they largely remain unopened by the presidential candidate, who’s conducting his own vetting process by asking friends, consultants, and insiders whom they think he should pick and why.
In these discussions, two names consistently rise to the top: Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, who was this weekend the subject of a flattering story in the New York Times and has been pushed by Don Jr.
But Rubio has strong support in Trump’s circle of advisers, especially among those with Florida ties. There’s just one problem.
Trump and Rubio are both Florida Men.
The Twelfth Amendment says that if the president and vice president inhabit the same state when the states’ electors cast their ballots (that’s on December 17 this year), the ticket could lose its Electoral College votes from that state (Florida has 30, 11 percent of the total needed to win the White House).
It’s called the “favorite sons” prohibition.
“Marco has this residency problem,” is how Trump describes it to others.
And boy, does he.
Putting Rubio on the ticket could trigger lawsuits, force the senator’s resignation, and potentially lead to two simultaneous U.S. Senate races in Florida, which hasn’t happened in the state since 1936 (both incumbents died in office that year). The question is whether Rubio on the ticket is too much of a headache and turnoff for Trump, or whether the legal chaos is perversely attractive.
TRUMP IS STRONGLY CONSIDERING Rubio because he’s keenly aware Rubio is fluent in Spanish, is the only Hispanic on his shortlist, and is attractive to the establishment donors his cash-hungry campaign needs. A member of the Senate’s intelligence and foreign relations committees, Rubio grew close to Trump during his presidency and served as a key Latin America adviser shaping Cuba and Venezuela policy. In 2019, two sources told me at the time, Rubio successfully lobbied Trump to ignore more hawkish voices in his administration who wanted the president to consider military action in Venezuela against strongman Nicolás Maduro.
“Trump respects Marco, and if it wasn’t for the residency issue, Marco would probably get it,” one Republican who spoke recently to Trump said. “He [Trump] is concerned about it. He said Rubio’s people have a memo showing it’s not a problem, but I’m not sure he’s convinced. And he’s damn sure not moving.”
Asked about this “memo,” Rubio advisers and those close to Trump’s campaign said they were unaware of the document.
Trump could change his residence back to New York (where he’s staying in Trump Tower during his trial) or to New Jersey (where he frequently summers at his golf course in Bedminster). But he doesn’t want to leave Florida. The state has no income tax and is so thoroughly Republican-controlled that he doesn’t have to worry about any local politicians causing trouble for him. Plus: Why should Trump move to accommodate his vice presidential pick? That’s a cuck move, for sure.
Moving residences is for betas and running mates.
COULD IT WORK? Probably. Rubio would have to establish residency or “inhabitance” out of state if he wants a shot on Trump’s ticket. He’s willing to do that, according to those familiar with his thinking, just as Dick Cheney did in 2000 when he moved in July of that year from Texas to Wyoming so that he could join then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s ticket. A trio of Texas residents sued in federal court, but Bush-Cheney prevailed.
“It is very hard for anyone to be able to sue and challenge the electors’ votes before the fact, because the candidate could always establish inhabitancy before the electors vote. And after they vote, it is really a matter for Congress to determine,” said Derek T. Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor and an expert in election law.
Another expert in election law, Ohio State University’s Edward B. Foley, agreed that Congress would ultimately decide the issue of Rubio’s inhabitancy under the Electoral Count Reform Act, which made it harder to successfully object to electoral votes.
“It’s up to Congress to sustain the objection and it takes a majority vote in both chambers to sustain one,” Foley said. “So you tell me the political likelihood that the Senate would disqualify Rubio from being vice president when he was a senator before he ran for vice president. I don’t think this is really enforceable in court. I think this is enforceable only in Congress.”
Foley said he could nevertheless see officials in states like Colorado, which unsuccessfully attempted to block Trump from the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause, try to challenge a Trump-Rubio ticket under the Twelfth Amendment.
BUT MAYBE RUBIO COULD JUST . . . move? Re-elected in 2022, Rubio could theoretically move out of state, remain senator, and return to the U.S. Senate if the Trump-Rubio ticket loses in November. That’s under a strict reading of the constitutional clause specifying senators must “be an Inhabitant” of their state “when elected”—it doesn’t say senators are prohibited from moving out of their state after they’re elected, Rubio allies say, although they expect lawsuits will follow if he changes residency but tries to stay in the Senate.
But there are non-legal considerations, too: the gravitational pull of Trump’s resentments toward Gov. Ron DeSantis. Under Florida law, DeSantis would get to pick Rubio’s “temporary” replacement until “the next general election.”
“Trump doesn’t want Ron to get a Senate pick,” said another Trump adviser. “And if Trump really wants Rubio on the ticket, he’ll want to make sure Ron’s pick is as short-lasting as possible.”
So if Rubio is offered a spot on Trump’s ticket, Trump might force him to announce his almost-immediate resignation from the seat to give voters a chance to decide his replacement November 5, when Sen. Rick Scott is seeking re-election.
A third Trump confidant was more circumspect: “[Trump] prefers that the people get to vote. That’s his consideration.” (DeSantis and Trump met to bury the hatchet on Sunday for the first time since DeSantis suspended his presidential campaign, but Trump’s antipathy remains. And DeSantis, unhappy Rubio endorsed Trump, doesn’t have a great relationship with either of his state’s senators.)
Though in his third term, Rubio advisers say he’s not wedded to the Senate and he might run for governor in 2026 anyway. The chances of that would increase if he resigned office or if Trump lost and Republicans failed to take control of the Senate.
SO LET’S TALK ABOUT LOGISTICS. If Rubio announced he was quitting this year, what’s the drop-dead date for the state to get his seat onto the general election ballot? The deadline for federal candidates to qualify for the November 5 ballot closed last Friday. Elections experts say DeSantis might be able to issue a “writ of election” to fill Rubio’s pending vacancy and allow candidates seeking his seat to qualify during the period for state legislators and county officials, which runs from June 10 to June 14.
Florida election law attorneys say they’re not sure what the process would be. The state’s Division of Elections wasn’t able to say, either.
Florida’s primary is August 20. But to make sure overseas military and foreign-service personnel have time to vote, the state’s 67 county election supervisors are required to begin sending out vote-by-mail ballots on July 6. The state deadline to certify the candidates for that August 20 primary ballot is June 21, seven days after state qualifying ends. That gives the supervisors time to properly design their ballots (which has historically been a big deal in Florida elections).
“Anything after June 21 becomes burdensome for us,” warned Christina White, supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county.
Aware of the media attention his running mate selection process attracts, Trump has indicated to others he might wait as long as possible to make his pick before the Republican National Convention, which starts July 15. So picking a running mate in early- or mid-June would shorten Trump’s time frame.
Is that complicated enough for you? Wait, there’s more!
Mark Herron, a Florida election law attorney who typically represents Democrats, said he believes Rubio’s pending resignation would trigger another state law governing special elections. And, he said, there already might not be enough time for DeSantis to call a special election in time for November.
“If Rubio quits before his term is up,” Herron said, “this makes it a special election for the unexpired balance of his term. In my view, it is a special election because it is filling a vacancy out of cycle.”
But another state election lawyer, Jennifer Blohm, said she wasn’t sure how the special election law and the other law governing elections for U.S. Senate vacancies would affect each other.
“There are so many ways to interpret this that it would probably be up to the courts,” she said.
Coincidentally, a majority of Florida’s supreme court was appointed by Republicans, and Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz was a top aide to Rubio when he was speaker of the Florida House.
THE QUESTION IS HOW BADLY Rubio wants to be Trump’s vice president. Answer: bad enough. Rubio has already run for president, and would be a heartbeat away from the White House under a one-term president who’s 77 and likes to eat McDonald’s too often.
Last week, Rubio aligned himself more closely with Trump, Vance, and the MAGA base by voting against a package to provide military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel and to require the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok—all of which Rubio has long supported. Rubio said in a speech on the Senate floor that the take-it-or-leave-it legislation was a type of “moral extortion” and “blackmail” that failed to secure the southern border.
“Marco can almost smell the Naval Observatory,” said a Trump adviser, referring to the official residence of the vice president, and echoing others who know Rubio, Trump, and the former president’s vetting process.
(A Rubio aide pushed back on the suggestion that the senator was flip-flopping for political gain by pointing out that he voted for reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Trump opposes.)
According to those who know them, both Rubio and Vance have made sure not to seem too eager to become Trump’s running mate.
“The more they position themselves, or the more people push Rubio or Vance or anyone, the less likely they’ll get picked,” one Trump adviser summed up, noting a contrast with Elise Stefanik and Tim Scott, both of whom seemed to want the job too much.
And the short list seems to be getting shorter. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a GOP presidential candidate who remained in good standing with Trump, has impressed the former president while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s chances probably died in a gravel pit with her dog, Cricket.
Chatter about Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has risen while speculation surrounding former Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has fallen.
This Friday, Rubio, Vance, Scott, Burgum, Noem, Stefanik, and Donalds are listed as special guests at a Republican National Committee fundraiser for Trump in Palm Beach.
And there’s one other: Former surgeon and Trump Housing Secretary Ben Carson is seen as a no-drama fallback option whose phlegmatic disposition and lack of ambition are attractive to a presidential candidate who doesn’t want a vice president to start running for president in January 2025.
Like Carson, Rubio ran against Trump in 2016. Unlike Carson, Rubio ran a scorched-earth campaign when Trump started accumulating victories, saying among other things, that Trump was a “dangerous” “con man” and an “embarrassment.”
During the same period, Vance also criticized Trump as an “idiot” who was “loathsome.” In 2022, he courted Trump and secured his endorsement to win his tough Ohio primary, his first election.
“Every time Trump talks to me about Vance, he reminds me of how shitty J.D. was to him in 2016,” one source, echoing others who recently discussed the process with Trump, chuckled.
Trump and Rubio made up more quickly after the election, especially when the president began relying on the senator’s expertise in Latin America. Rubio helped stock Trump’s administration with Cuba hardliners.
The shared politics and policy of both men helped Trump in 2020 almost win Miami-Dade County. Once a Democratic bastion, Miami-Dade is home to much of the state’s large Cuban-exile community that began to adore Trump when he embraced its native son and the issues important to them.
“No one knows how to manage Trump, but Rubio knows how to talk to him and make his case,” said one Republican familiar with their mutual relationship. “For Trump, that goes a long way. Will it mean Rubio is the guy? No one knows. Hell, Trump probably doesn’t know, either.”
I want to see the scenario Tim has been pitching - Trump gets Marco to move and then picks someone else.
Well detailed reporting as always, but Gawd! how I hate this topic. I actually feel kind of greasy and dirty reading an account of these unprincipled sycophants