Gheorghe Explains the Election: Trump's VP Pick

It's a foregone conclusion that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee come November. This is surprising at first blush, but not so much when you look at his closest competitors.



Also surprising at first blush was Chris Christie's decision to endorse Trump. Shortly before he dropped out of the race, Christie used the Marls voice to mockingly impersonate Trump.



Pundits have posited that Christie made this move with the hopes of getting the vice presidential nod. I don't see that happening.

Picking a vice president is difficult. For example, about 25 years ago a man named Bush was running for president as a Republican. At the time the GOP was perceived as being less than welcoming to minorities, so he apparently considered making Colin Powell his veep. Chris Rock explained why he didn't--someone would try to kill Bush so that Powell would be the first black president. So instead he went with Dan Quayle, probably because no one on earth would kill Bush to put Quayle in the big seat. Parenthetically, despite being a remarkably reasonable pick for president, Bush lost to someone named Clinton largely because an upstart billionaire lunatic with no elected experience decided to make a self-funded run for the presidency. It was a completely different world back then.

Although Christie isn't wildly popular, most rational people would prefer a President Christie over a President Trump. So if Christie got the veep nod, then politicians from both sides of the aisle would do anything they could to impeach The Donald. Trump knows this (he's running his campaign on some next-level reality TV competition three-steps-ahead shit) so his VP pick will be even less appealing than he is, but will still bring in some extra votes that Trump doesn't already have. Who might that be?

1. Sarah Palin

She already endorsed Trump and will help get some of the Cruz/Tea Party/maniac vote that Trump doesn't already have. She has that whole mavericky outsider thing going on and could theoretically help remediate Trump's image with women. No one would do anything to kill or depose Trump so that Palin could move up--that's a frying-pan-to-fire situation. Her downside is that she already destroyed a GOP nominee's campaign.

2. David Duke

No one will kill Trump to put Duke in charge. A Trump/Duke ticket would lock up 99.999% of the racist/xenophobe vote, practically guaranteeing that most if not all of Cruz's and Rubio's anti-immigrant base will vote Trump. A Trump/Duke ticket would also repulse all of the non-white vote, as well as all voters with humanity and conscience. Seems like a longshot but then again, nothing makes sense this election cycle.

3. Arnold Schwarzanegger

This isn't an outlandish choice. He ran two successful campaigns as a liberal-ish Republican in a blue state. He governed one of the largest economies in the world. He might be an even bigger celebrity than Trump and he has a devoted following of fans that will bring in votes. Having Schwarzanegger on the ticket might help rational conservatives reconcile the reasonableness of an otherwise unreasonable vote for Trump.

Arnold cannot be president because he was born in Austria so if Trump is out then Paul Ryan would be the Prez. This might seem to cut against Arnold (Geoff would try to snuff Trump in an instant in this scenario), but when you think more it makes total sense. If someone were going to try to assassinate the president, wouldn't you want The Terminator there to protect him? They made like three or four movies on this exact topic where he successfully repelled time-traveling liquid metal monsters to save Edward Furlong! He's perfectly fit to shield The Donald. Sure, some of the more ignorant racist voters would look at the last five letters of Schwarzanegger's name and refuse to vote for him, but how many ignorant racists who are unfamiliar with the Governator can there be?

4. Jim Dolan/Fred Wilpon/Dan Snyder/Donald Sterling

A repugnant inexperienced billionaire president could protect his job by backing himself up with an even more repugnant and inexperienced billionaire vice president. Dolan, Wilpon, Snyder and Sterling have solid track records of atrocious spending and terrible management/decision-making. No one wants them in charge of something as irrelevant as a sports franchise let alone the country. But any one of these four mopes would bring in a lot of votes, perhaps counter-intuitively. If you're a fan of any of their franchises, would you rather have them screwing up your team or screwing up the Trump administration (which will be screwed up no matter the veep selection)? These guys have legs. Snyder and Sterling might be Trump's first options given their enlightened views on race.

5. Stacey Dash

How many famously conservative black women are there? She would provide a modicum of cover on Trump's racist and sexist shortcomings, and she's remarkably photogenic. Damon Dash could be Secretary of Commerce.

6. Dan Quayle

It worked for G.H.W. Bush in 1988.

Any of the foregoing make more sense than a Vice President Christie in terms of getting more votes and for protecting Trump's back. I predict instead that Trump puts Christie up for Justice Scalia's seat and after confirmation he morphs into a law-and-order version of Justice Souter.

And none of it will matter when former Trump endorsee/billionaire Mitt Romney runs as a self-funded independent candidate.

Gheorghe Handicaps the MLB Playoffs

The 2015 Major League Baseball postseason begins today in New York with the American League Wild Card Playoff between the Yankees and the Los Angeles Angels Houston Astros. Our staff has crunched the numbers, and determined who we think will win the World Series.

Of course we haven't done that. There have been no numbers crunched, and we don't have the first clue about who will actually make it through the baseball postseason's random outcome generator. What we do know for a certainty, though, is which teams you should root for, and which you should hate with passion.

In order from most odious to the pluckiest everyman/underdog story, then:

The New York Yankees celebrated their return to the postseason for the first time since 2012 with a full-on champagne and beer shower party. How True Yankee of them. This team is led by Alex Rodriguez, something Bomber fans seem to have conveniently forgotten as the team trudged down the stretch hoping that the season would end before the wheels fell completely from their wobbling conveyance. The only redeeming thing about a deep Yankee playoff run would be the fact that it would expose the extent to which Derek Jeter's stinking carcass impacted their results for the past three years.

I guess I don't really dislike the St. Louis Cardinals, but I sure am tired of seeing them this time of year. Throw us a frickin' bone here.

If not for their sunny hometown and its generally laid-back vibe (and the fact that people on the East Coast give fewer than two shits about anything that happens out West), the Los Angeles Dodgers would garner every bit of disdain as the Yankees and the other profligate spenders in baseball's upside-down economy. The Dodgers, in fact, make the Yankees seem penurious, outspending every team in baseball, with a payroll more than $50m higher than the second-place New Yorkers' $219m. Like Tara Reid on a plastic surgery bender, L.A.'s spending reached preposterous levels, more than doubling that of all but seven other MLB franchises. An early exit to the fiscally clownish Mets would be deliciously ironic.

Nobody outside of Dallas knows much of anything about the Texas Rangers, and they care even less. It's not that we dislike them, it's that we don't care.

If the Toronto Blue Jays were the Oakland A's, they'd be really confused. They'd also get a lot more love from the baseball press. The Jays are going to win the World Series. They're so far ahead of everyone else in baseball in terms of run differential, that the second place team can't even see them. They combine a ripsnorting lineup, a lockdown number one starter, and a tidy bullpen. They have the American League's best ERA post-ASB by a wide margin, and the league's highest OPS and runs scored over the same span. But they're not American. Hard to like foreigners.

It's not hard to like these New York Mets - they're young, they just toppled a particularly arrogant Washington Nationals squad, their superstar is the very model of modern classy ballplayer (until his closet aspargus porn videos finally surface), and they're not the Yankees. But they're still from New York, which counts against them fairly substantially in the underdog category. And their ownership defines both clueless rich and financially incompetent, a daily double that would've doomed lesser teams to Phillie-like ignominy.

The Kansas City Royals would be much higher on this list, but for the fact that they made it to the World Series just last year, and the bloom is off the plucky, out-of-nowhere small market kids.

It's a shame that the Pittsburgh Pirates play in the same division as the Cardinals. And yet another reason to hate St. Louis. The Buccos have the second-best record in all of baseball and still have to suffer the vicissitudes of the play-in game (against the team with the third-best mark in the bigs). After consecutive losses in that most random of all games, Pittsburghers will be forgiven their apprehension, safe in the knowledge that everyone will be pulling for them...oh, man.

The Houston Astros are this year's Royals - they arrived a year or so before we expected to see them playing meaningful autumn baseball. They're young (see Carlos Correa, who might not even shave yet), goofy (Dallas Keuchel's beard, for the win), and tiny (Jose Altuve is my spirit animal). They've got the best uniforms in the playoffs, and if it wasn't for the fact that they come from Houston would be overwhelming favorites for the top spot on this list.

You might argue that the Chicago Cubs are the safe choice here, that rooting for the Northsiders to finally break their World Series schneid is cliche. You'd be right. But this Cubs team is also hella entertaining to watch, with Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, Kyle Schwarber, Starlin Castro raking and Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester leading the pitching staff. Joe Maddon's the most fun manager in baseball, and might be the most likable skipper in all of professional sports. Set aside for a moment the certainty that a deep Cubs run would mean endless loops of Will Ferrell as Harry Caray, and ask yourself who you'd root for if your team wasn't playing in the postseason.

If you've got a soul, the answer is the Cubbies.