When Donald Trump told the Associated Press earlier this week that he’d narrowed his list of potential running mates to “5 or 6,” he refused to reveal who they were, except to say that he wasn’t ruling out New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and that his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was running the VP vetting effort with a group that included former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and himself.
Now we have more names.
In an interview with Greta van Susteren on Fox News on Tuesday night, he suggested he was considering former Arizona governor Jan Brewer and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin. And now Bloomberg reports that Trump’s campaign has been giving a close look at former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Trump has been asking his advisors about Gingrich during conversations at the Trump Tower in New York, according to Bloomberg.
Rick Tyler, who was an aide to Gingrich for 12 years in Congress and also worked with the former House Speaker during his 2012 presidential bid, told Bloomberg that he was “confident” that the 72-year-old Gingrich was being considered and thought he could act as a kind of senior policy advisor to Trump, in the way that Dick Cheney did with George W. Bush.
While not publicly campaigning for the job, Gingrich has been an outspoken cheerleader for Trump while others—i.e. current House Speaker Paul Ryan—have been less enthusiastic. When asked why he thought Trump would be a good president in an interview with TIME published this week, Gingrich gave this response:
I think he has the potential to be an extraordinarily dynamic president who shakes up a bureaucratic city that badly needs to be shaken up. I think that the bureaucracies in Washington have gotten the attitude that they run the country, not that the country runs them. And I think in a free society, that’s very unhealthy.
He also gave some suggestions as to what he thought Trump should look for in a VP:
I think there are three characteristics: Is it a person who could actually be president if something happened to the president? Are they compatible in their ideas and attitudes, could they work together as a team? And third, do they do at least a little bit to help win the election. I think you think of them in that order and they have to pass each of the three tests.
Gingrich offered some candidates he would eye, with this in mind: Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.); Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa); and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin.
But when he was asked if he would take the job himself, Gingrich got cagey. “I’m not going to get into that. I think that’s very unlikely,” he said. “There are many good potential candidates.”
Still, if Trump does sign up Gingrich, they’ll have at least one thing in common (besides preternaturally buoyant hair): they’re both on their third attempt at marital bliss.
