by David Daileda, July 14, 2016.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is
supposedly set to announce his vice presidential pick on Friday, though
the news could very well leak before then (and maybe already has?)

The finalists are a pretty eclectic bunch for a VP short list. 
We’ve got brief rundowns of each potential candidate, below.

Mike Pence

AP Photo/Mark Humphrey

First, the presumed frontrunner. 

Pence is the governor of Indiana. Even former (like, way-former)
House Speaker and viable Trump VP pick Newt Gingrich seems to believe
Pence will get it. 

Pence is famous/infamous for passing a 2015 state law
that opened the door to potential discrimination by businesses against
the LGBT community if the business owners said their religious beliefs
conflicted with the idea of same-sex marriage.

The governor is socially conservative and well connected in
Washington, D.C., something Trump has said he’s looking for in a running
mate, seeing as how the candidate himself has only been a politician
for a little more than a year now. 

Pence also may be seeking to boost his national credentials while at
the same time stepping away from his race for reelection — a race that
polls show he could very well lose. 

Newt Gingrich

AP Photo/John Minchillo

If
you feel like you know this name and know his name is vaguely
associated with politics but can’t quite figure out why, that’s because
Gingrich has been out of the game for a while now. 

He even wrote about hi-tech watches for Mashable during his time off. Yep. 

But before he was a tech blogger, Gingrich was the speaker of the
House and a presidential candidate himself in 2012, albeit not a very
good one. 

He’d wanted to be speaker since he first ran for Congress in 1974. He
lost, then lost again in 1976, but won in 1978 and went on to become
speaker in 1994, where he demanded to be a kind of “co-president” alongside then-president Bill Clinton. 

But his rise burned out in 1998, when Republicans largely blamed
Gingrich for a disastrous GOP performance during mid-term elections that
year, and he resigned months later. 

Reek

AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

Reek’s real name is Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey, who is constantly made fun of for never being in New Jersey. 

A long time ago in a galaxy seemingly very far away, Christie was seen as the Republican candidate who could bridge the gap between the two parties and take the White House from the Democrats in 2016. 

But then his staff orchestrated a massive amount of traffic
in a small New Jersey borough as payback to the borough president for
not endorsing him in his gubernatorial reelection campaign. After this
occurred, Christie’s chances dropped to the point that he was an
afterthought from the moment he announced he was running for president.

He dropped out of the race early on and became one of the first
former Trump rivals to endorse the candidate. He has since followed
Trump around like a…well, like Reek, the Game of Thrones character who
was once known by a different name (Theon Greyjoy) and held in high
regard until being captured and tortured into submission.

Mike Flynn

AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke

Flynn is a retired
Army lieutenant general and former head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, someone Trump would pick if he decided he didn’t care as much
about having one of those Washington insiders he’s always talking
about. 

Flynn would likely boost Trump’s credibility in the realm of foreign
policy, but the former general has some notably left-leaning thoughts on
abortion (which he has hastily changed) and gay marriage, which have
probably put him on the outside looking in. Flynn is also a registered
Democrat.

Then again, Trump may also have a few left-leaning thoughts of his
own, and he’s reportedly into the idea of a businessman and a general
taking over the top spots in the nation’s capital.

Who knows? 

Image: AP Photo/Bill Kostroun

Trump
has said he has vice presidential candidates “nobody knows about,” so
maybe the pick will be someone totally unexpected…?

Maybe it’ll be former Denver Broncos and New York Jets and Florida
Gators quarterback and soon-to-be Republican National Committee
Convention speaker Tim Tebow? 


Maybe it’ll be his daughter, Ivanka Trump? 

Or one of his sons?


Maybe it’ll be one of those friends he always says back up his vague policy ideas?


Maybe it’ll be the ghost of Ronald Reagan?


Maybe he’ll print out each individual email Hillary Clinton sent as
secretary of state, staple them into one massive packet, and declare
that wad of paper his running mate?


Are any of these ideas really so out-there as to be unimaginable? 


Is 2016 just a collective year-long mass-delusion?


The point is, who knows?

 SOURCE: Mashable