Trump Isn’t Choosing a Running Mate. He’s Casting a Co-Star.

The public jockeying by various candidates to become Donald Trump’s running mate has taken on the air of a circus. At the Manhattan criminal courthouse where he was being tried for falsifying business records (and was found guilty on all 34 counts), a parade of acolytes appeared, often wearing Trump-red ties, in apparent hopes of impressing their potential future ticket-mate: Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio; Senator Rick Scott of Florida; Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; the businessman and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; and others.

Aspiring contenders clambered for camera time, made public declarations of support and later posted on social media about the injustice of the verdict. Mr. Trump has invited other potential running mates, such as Senator Tim Scott, to join him at his rallies, where they often serve in the role of a hype man, introducing the main attraction in glowing terms.

A traditional vice-presidential search happens discreetly, with possible picks lobbying behind the scenes and through proxies while publicly downplaying their interest. Mr. Trump’s search is playing out more like an open cattle call audition.

But Mr. Trump is always governing for the cameras — his favorite constituency. Viewed through that lens, his veepstakes make much more sense. The process is playing out in public, with unvarnished careerism on view, in the familiar form of a reality show. Mr. Trump was America’s first reality-TV president, and now he’s reviving the hits: He’s turned the veepstakes into a reboot of “The Apprentice.”

It’s a mentality I came to understand intimately while interviewing him, starting in 2021 after he’d left the White House, for a book on “The Apprentice.” Mr. Trump gave me hours of his time, often extending our scheduled meetings at Trump Tower as we watched clips of the show together. I discerned that, in many ways, Mr. Trump sees his runs for president and his time in the White House as extensions of his reality show. In our conversations, he seemed engrossed by his own image and the minutiae of his TV career, far more than by anything he achieved as leader of the free world.

His experience hosting “The Apprentice” informs how he views the world and how he makes his decisions. He often talked about job applicants in terms of “central casting,” channeling the spirit of a producer assembling a movie cast. For the show, Mr. Trump would stop by casting calls to meet thousands of contestants, and he told me he believed that he could identify star power simply by the way someone looked. That attitude helps explain what he’s looking for in a V.P.: the ability to generate headlines and prompt the kind of drama that ensures his audience won’t look away.