Trump ‘seriously’ considered choosing Fox host Maria Bartiromo as his veep, new book claims
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Trump was ‘dead serious’ about tapping the MAGA host as his running mate, according to a new book. While the president-elect has already appointed or nominated at least a dozen Fox News personalities to his upcoming administration, Isenstadt reports in his forthcoming book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power that Trump seriously considered making one his favorite hosts his running mate.
Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, a longtime MAGA sycophant who conducted the first post-election TV interview with Trump following his 2020 election loss, was in the running for the vice presidential slot just weeks ahead of the Republican National Convention, according to Isenstadt.
In fact, Trump was “dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania),” Isenstadt wrote. It was the Butler campaign rally where Trump was the target of an assassination attempt in July of last year.
“She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team,” the Politico reporter added. Notably, Bartiromo was one of the most prominent defenders of Trump’s false assertions that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him due to “rigged” voting machines. Her amplification of these baseless election conspiracy theories eventually resulted in Fox News paying out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
Eventually, the president-elect’s campaign team convinced him to move on as there “was no time to vet Bartiromo,” and they had spent months looking at other candidates. In the end, campaign chief of staff Susie Wiles brought the conversation to an end.
