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President-elect Donald J. Trump allegedly considered tapping Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo to be his running mate before he chose Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) for the bottom half of the GOP ticket, a new book by a Politico reporter claims.

According to the book “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power,” one of the first in a line of anti-Trump tomes that will be churned now that he’s won the election, the incoming president “seriously” entertained the idea of choosing the “Money Honey” to be his vice president before being talked out of the idea by aides.

Excerpts from the book, which was penned by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, are getting lots of play from the more gossipy media outlets with the juicy nugget about Bartiromo being among them.

Isenstadt writes that Bartiromo was a “Trump favorite” after what he described as conducting “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air sit-down following the 2020 election, for which she had given his team a heads-up on her questions ahead of time.”

The book claims that Trump was making the case for the longtime Fox Business fixture on the flight to Butler, PA in July where he was nearly assassinated, and suggests that he could have selected her instead of Vance.

“She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV,” Trump allegedly told his team which allegedly stressed that there “was no time to vet Bartiromo, as they had spent months doing with other candidates,” until the idea was nixed by “Ice Maiden” Susie Wiles, his incoming White House chief of staff.

Among the outlets heavily flogging the alleged near pick of Bartiromo are CNN, Mediaite, the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast, and Media Matters for America.

“Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “There is nobody who is a better and stronger defender of the America First agenda, and he will continue to be a leader of the movement for years to come.”

The Bartiromo VP angle seems to be just Trump being Trump and throwing things out there but serves as a setup for the more serious allegation in the book that Trump was fed advance questions for a Fox News town hall in Iowa last January that was moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt claims.

That the two excerpts just happen to involve Fox News doesn’t seem to be random and as is almost always the case, the source for the gossip is anonymous, coming from among the hundreds of people said to have been interviewed for the book which is set to be released in March.

“In Revenge, journalist Alex Isenstadt takes readers deep into Mar-a-Lago, inside the courtroom, and aboard ‘Trump Force One’ to show how Trump and his revamped team responded, overcame, and in some cases orchestrated each and every surreal moment in this one-of-a-kind presidential campaign. Based on extraordinary access and over 300 interviews, Isenstadt paints a unique and deeply revealing portrait of a man bent on returning to the White House at all costs – and who successfully portrayed himself as an avatar of vengeance for the millions of Americans who voted for him,” reads the Amazon description for the book. “Now, for the first time, readers will experience Trump’s reelection bid from the inside.”

Chris Donaldson
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