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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. So who else is on the list? We’ll get into Trump’s options after four new stories from The Atlantic:

The blindness of elites What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? David Frum: What Joe Biden needs to say about anti-Semitism Mark Leibovich: “House Republicans showed up at a campus protest. Of course.”

Trump’s Big Decision

As a reporter, it is my duty to remind you that Trump’s team loves messing with the media almost as much as it loves jockeying for influence with the big man himself. Trump’s advisers might dish, for example, that after careful consideration, so-and-so is off the vice-president list, and you know who is back on. They might explain that, actually, some of the usual considerations of geography and gender aren’t playing a role in this VP decision.

But the truth is, none of these supposed insiders really knows much. No one has any idea what Trump is thinking, except for Trump himself. And the former president is quite famously unpredictable, with a well-established tendency to make decisions based on his most recent conversation. Predicting his Veep pick, then, is a bit futile. It’s also really early: Candidates don’t typically choose a running mate until around the party convention, in late summer. And Trump will likely try to milk as much media coverage as he can out of making people wait.

Still, without prognosticating too much, we can anticipate what Trump is probably looking for in a vice president. He’ll want someone who looks good on television but not someone who might outshine him. Someone who isn’t polarizing to the MAGA base but who demonstrates range. He’ll choose a candidate with experience, or at least with some record of being a winner. He is probably not looking for a politician to “balance” out his ticket like Mike Pence did in 2016, when Trump desperately needed to win over evangelicals.

Above all, of course, Trump will want someone unfailingly loyal to him. This time around, it’s not about logic or persuasion—it’s about personality. The Republican strategists Doug Heye and Mike Murphy, neither of whom are involved with the Trump campaign, walked me through some of Trump’s VP options.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott

Why does this name keep floating around? Well, the senator, who’s been in office for more than a decade, has always been popular. He’s a former insurance salesman who knows how to schmooze, and, Heye told me, he’s also a “prodigious fundraiser.” Scott never fully cozied up to Trump while the latter was president, but he didn’t criticize him much either. “He played it smart,” Murphy told me, by not getting too close or too far. The dynamic changed when Scott launched his own presidential campaign last year. “He was the puppy on his back, supplicant,” even while he was running against Trump, Murphy said, and that loyalty “will appeal to Trump.”

Scott could also—the thinking goes—help Trump appeal to Black voters, who have already started peeling off from Democrats, albeit in a small way. Trump and his campaign have seemed obsessed with this task as they try to avoid a repeat of 2020, and Scott could help them do it.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Trump’s former press secretary was on even the earliest iterations of his 2024 VP shortlist. She is in her first term as a state governor and has enacted plenty of MAGA-style legislation. She’s smart and spent two years working for Trump, which means that she’s familiar with handling the D.C. media and that Trump is probably pretty comfortable with her. Having a woman like Sanders on the ticket could help Trump pick up women voters, another demographic he’s struggled with. “She’s never going to have any agenda or not be the completely loyal type,” Murphy said. “And [she’s] less of a star, so no worry of [Trump] being diminished at all.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum

Burgum has been governor for eight years and seems well liked. He’s personally wealthy, like Trump, but not famous. He’s ambitious, but not in a way that intimidates Trump. He ran for president this cycle too, remember? If you don’t, that’s probably a plus for Trump.

When you pick a vice president, you should “pick a slightly less impressive version of yourself,” Murphy told me—like when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, another moderate, Protestant white man. “When you’re John McCain, [if] you pick a Sarah Palin, it’s just trouble,” he said. Could Burgum be that slightly less impressive version of Trump?

New York Representative Elise Stefanik

This 39-year-old House Republican has been openly auditioning for the VP slot for years now. She’s a gifted fundraiser and easily the most powerful Republican in New York. She has establishment bona fides—Harvard, the George W. Bush White House, aide to Paul Ryan—but has devoted herself entirely to Trump’s defense and the MAGA cause. She’s a competent woman who could help Trump appeal to other educated women. The problem, of course, is that he may not find her particularly authentic. “She’d poison her mother to get two points on Election Day,” Murphy said. “And I think he would smell that.”

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance

The Hillbilly Elegy author and former venture capitalist seems to share Trump’s populist sensibilities. Vance was once a Trump critic but changed his tune when he ran for the Senate. He’s ambitious in a way that Trump might read as disingenuous—probably because it is. “If I were Trump, I’d be troubled by the fact that J. D. Vance was calling [Republican strategists] to ask about running as an anti-Trump Republican when he first looked at running statewide in Ohio,” Murphy said. Then again, he said, “Vance is a clever-enough chameleon to be able to suck up to Trump with skill.”

Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Carson, a former neurosurgeon, ran for president against Trump back in 2016. He worked in the administration for a while, heading up HUD. We haven’t heard much from him since then, but he does seem to hang out in Trump’s circles, and has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago on more than one occasion.

Carson could, in theory, help Trump appeal to Black voters. But he doesn’t have quite the political credentials that Scott does. “I was meeting a friend for drinks back in February, and he said he knows for a fact that it’s going to be Ben Carson,” Heye told me. “I’m like, ‘Okay, well, one, it’s February. Two, why Ben Carson?’”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

Rubio is young and telegenic, with two terms in the Senate (plus a failed presidential campaign) under his belt. The son of Cuban immigrants, he could theoretically help Trump appeal to Latino voters. The problem is, Rubio would have to resign from the Senate. He’d also have to change his residence, because the Constitution bars electors from voting for a president and a vice president from the same state. Trump picking Rubio is “completely far-fetched—with the caveat that when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, far-fetched things happen,” Heye said.

Kari Lake

The Arizona TV anchor turned Stop the Steal devotee would clearly love to serve as Trump’s vice president. (See her here, vacuuming a red carpet for the former president.) But Lake has never actually won a race, and Trump, as we all know, prefers a winner.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

She’s still on the list, because in Trumpworld anything is possible. But shooting a dog in a gravel pit? It’s about the worst thing you can do for your political career.

Related:

Did Kristi Noem just doom her career? Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition

Today’s News

The Justice Department announced that Texas Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, have been indicted on bribery and money-laundering charges. In a statement, Cuellar said that he and his wife are innocent of the charges. The former White House official Hope Hicks, who once was one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, testified at Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. Canadian police arrested three people tied to last year’s killing of a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia, and are continuing to investigate allegations that the individuals were hired by the Indian government.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Poetry is an act of hope, Maya Chung writes. It can help us come closest to capturing events that exist beyond our capacity to describe them. Atlantic Intelligence: New consumer gadgets are coming out, and their entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence, Damon Beres writes. The broken-gadget era is upon us.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Racehorses Have No Idea What’s Going On

By Haley Weiss

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Medieval pets had one of humanity’s most cursed diseases. When writers silence writers What is Wagner doing in Africa? Marijuana’s health effects are about to get a whole lot clearer.

Culture Break

Michael Buckner / Deadline via Contour RA by Getty

Watch. I Saw the TV Glow (out now in theaters), the unsettling new film directed by Jane Schoenbrun. They’ve got some ideas about how to make a genuinely weird mainstream movie.

Read. “Noon,” a poem by Li-Young Lee:

“The tall curtains billow / with presences coming and going, impossible / to confirm.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As a 30-year-old city dweller with a dog and no kids, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the role of friendship in my life. Making friends feels harder when you’re an adult—your days are suddenly so full of commitments, and interesting new people aren’t standing right in front of you at recess. Worse, at least in a place like D.C., where I live, friends tend to come and go with the seasons: They get new jobs, leave for grad school, have babies. I’m curious to hear from readers who’ve figured it out: What’s your best advice for making new friends as an adult? And what are your tips for keeping in touch with the old ones, as you all move along in life?

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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On May 4, 1970, 54 years ago today, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters gathered on the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University, killing four students and injuring another nine. Several hundred students had been protesting against the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and the mayor of the city of Kent asked the governor of Ohio to bring in members of the National Guard. News coverage of the shooting of unarmed protesters dominated headlines around the world and spurred hundreds of protests across the country. Gathered below are images from that pivotal day in American history.

Students at dozens of colleges and universities across the country are occupying quads, lawns, and buildings in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, demanding that their universities divest from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies. But is cutting such financial ties even possible? And even if it were, would the loss of colleges’ investments actually change the bottom line for businesses operating in the region or providing arms for the conflict?

Institutions of higher education hold close to $1 trillion in their endowments, much of it parked in index funds, hedge funds, and private-equity funds that invest in equities, bonds, derivatives, real estate, start-ups, and so on. They do not generally make individual investments themselves, meaning that divestment would not be as simple as executing a few stock orders.

That does not mean they have no say over where their money goes, however. Many universities already can claim that they avoid pouring money into industries that damage the planet or hurt people. In one survey of 688 schools with endowments, 187 said they had a “responsible investment strategy.” Many put their cash in “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) funds that invest only in firms committed to meeting environmental and social standards (such as measuring their carbon output and reporting on the gender and racial balance of their workforce). Other endowments engage in “impact investing,” pushing cash to for-profit enterprises working for the common good (such as ones building homes, grocery stores, and schools in low-income neighborhoods). Still others bar investment in gambling and tobacco.

Plus, universities have divested before. In the 1980s, protesters at schools around the country formed encampments and demanded divestment from businesses operating in apartheid South Africa. Many schools agreed. (Endowments were smaller and simpler then.) In the past decade, scores of colleges and universities—including Columbia, Brown, and Harvard—have divested from fossil-fuel firms after being petitioned by campus activists; others pulled money out of Russia after its incursion into Ukraine; others divested from private prisons and the retailers of assault weapons.

Divestment from Israel would not be straightforward. It might not be immediate. (And at least one state, Ohio, has a law barring its public universities from divesting from Israel.) But it is certainly possible, Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at UC Merced who studies university endowments, told me. “If you’re a Columbia or a Brown or a Princeton or a Harvard, you have a lot of leverage as a very large investor. If you’ve got an endowment that’s valued in the tens of billions of dollars, you can find somebody who will manage the funds according to your preferences.”

If schools chose to do this, they would face little financial risk. Their investments are so big that pulling back from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies, a tiny share of the global economy, would do essentially nothing to their bottom line.

[Read: If you’re worried about the climate, move your money]

The specific decisions that a college would have to make are more complicated. Schools could divest from Israeli firms and military contractors around the world if they actually wanted to. But what about firms with major operations in Israel? Firms whose wares or services are purchased by the Israel Defense Forces? Some students at Columbia argue that the school should drop its investments in all companies “profiting from Israeli apartheid,” including Amazon, Airbnb, Hyundai, and Google, among others.

A yet-bigger question is whether divestment would do anything. In terms of changing the financial outlook for the firms being called out, the clear answer is no, not much. The old investing chestnut applies: For every seller, there is a buyer. If University A sells its shares in military contractor B and Israeli technology firm C, pension fund D is going to pick them up. Unless a huge share of the world’s investors refuses to put money into the companies in question, share prices and financing costs won’t be affected much. Indeed, studies of ESG investing show no effect on a company’s expected returns. The South Africa divestment campaign did not seem to do much either.

That said, some studies of fossil-fuel divestment show a small, but measurable, effect. Divestment has reduced the share price of American coal companies, for instance. The world’s financiers came to see investing in coal as riskier, in essence, and lower returns as likelier.

Still, this kind of analysis misses the point. Most students understand that divestment would not bring down the Israeli economy or end the war. Their goal is not really a financial one but a political one: They don’t want their universities supporting Israel or associated with the human tragedy in Gaza. They oppose the war.

Likewise, the real opposition to divestment is political, not technical. Most Americans believe that Israel has a valid reason to be targeting Hamas; the country is split on whether the bombardment campaign itself is justified. Many donors to colleges and universities find the protests anti-Semitic, support Israel, and don’t want to see administrators give in. Some are even promising to quit giving money to their alma maters if the schools divest.

University administrators, for their part, seem to be searching for ways to make everyone happy, by promising to study the issue or hold votes on their investment strategies. Brown committed to meet with a divestment coalition. The University of Minnesota agreed to share more information about its holdings. It seems unlikely that much will come from these initiatives. But if colleges felt compelled to divest, they could certainly do so.