After an extended competition, “The Apprentice: VP” will wrap in the next few days and Donald Trump will announce his choice.
Among his rumored finalists, we implore him to pick Doug Burgum as the best junior partner to help him cement a historic legacy in four years.
None of Burgum, Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance will outright help Trump win in November, as Nikki Haley or Glenn Youngkin might’ve.
But they have not made the shortlist.
The former president is on course to win outright by himself: All the battleground states are swinging his way.
So his top priority in choosing a No. 2 becomes: Who will do the best job of helping him with the enormous work facing him as the next president?
Some of Trump’s first-term top team fell short; that has the least chance of happening with Burgum.
The prez will set the policies and priorities as he starts leading America and the world.
But in Burgum, an enormously impressive manager and businessman, he has someone who can get stuck into the backbreaking work that is needed to turn this country around.
Any administration needs to unleash prosperity via common-sense tax and business policies, to lift all boats in every demographic and in every state (as they did in Trump’s first term).
Underpinning that, there would need to be a sound energy policy that allows America to meet the tremendous demands of the coming AI revolution — a race we can’t afford to lose against China, which laughs at the economic suicide of aiming at “net zero” carbon emissions within foolhardy timelines.
Burgum’s business experience utterly dwarfs that of the other finalists’ and his state is a huge energy provider.
He started a company as an undergrad at North Dakota state, then after Stanford biz school worked as McKinsey consultant before co-founding, and soon leading, a software firm back home in Fargo.
Great Plains Software sold to Microsoft for $1.1 billion in stock in 2001, becoming the core of a biz-services unit that Burgum still ran — until he left to found a venture-capital firm, with a side job at a Fargo-focused real-estate-development shop.
In short: Against Vance’s handful of years working as a venture capitalist, and Rubio’s short stint as a lawyer before a long (and successful) career in elected office, Burgum had a full, smashing career in business before taking on his local GOP political establishment to win North Dakota’s governorship.
The supposed black mark against him?
He signed the 2023 law strictly limiting abortion that the state Legislature passed overwhelmingly.
Reality check: At the time, North Dakota had exactly zero abortion clinics; the law reflected public sentiment in that state — a position that is in keeping with Trump and the recently updated RNC policy platform.
And Burgum came out against passing any national abortion law on the second day of his prez run, saying we should leave the issue to the states — well before Trump landed on that position.
Just as in North Dakota, women and men in every state now have the opportunity to vote with their hearts and minds.
Rubio and Vance are committed pro-lifers, too: Rubio has supported a national abortion ban after 15 weeks and supports Florida’s strict limits; Vance ran as pro-life for the Senate in 2022, and worked hard against the liberal abortion law Ohio voters passed last year.
To be fair, this issue is currently almost irrelevant, except when it comes to Democratic attack ads.
As party leader and would-be president, it is Trump’s position that matters, and Congress is far too divided on abortion to pass any serious legislation for the foreseeable future.
Donald Trump’s second term is going to focus on the nation’s urgent needs — putting out the fires Biden’s weakness has invited across the world, setting the border to rights, making America again the world’s top energy producer and, above all, restoring an economy that provides good jobs and rising wages for all.
Doug Burgum is easily the best veep to help the second term go down in history as one of the best ever.
That will leave Rubio, Vance and others in the next generation of GOP leaders to follow up after 2028, competing to lead a strong America that’s back on top because Trump-Burgum got it there.