The governor, the general, and Reek: Here are Trump's VP finalists
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is supposedly set to announce his vice presidential pick on Friday, though the news could very well leak before then (and maybe already has?)
The finalists are a pretty eclectic bunch for a VP short list.
We've got brief rundowns of each potential candidate, below.
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Mike Pence
First, the presumed frontrunner.
Pence is the governor of Indiana. Even former (like, way-former) House Speaker and viable Trump VP pick Newt Gingrich seems to believe Pence will get it.
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Pence is famous/infamous for signing a 2015 state law that opened the door to potential discrimination by businesses against the LGBT community if the business owners said their religious beliefs conflicted with the idea of same-sex marriage.
The governor is socially conservative and well connected in Washington, D.C., something Trump has said he's looking for in a running mate, seeing as how the candidate himself has only been a politician for a little more than a year now.
Pence also may be seeking to boost his national credentials while at the same time stepping away from his race for reelection -- a race that polls show he could very well lose.
Newt Gingrich
If you feel like you know this name and know his name is vaguely associated with politics but can't quite figure out why, that's because Gingrich has been out of the game for a while now.
He even wrote about hi-tech watches for Mashable during his time off. Yep.
But before he was a tech blogger, Gingrich was the speaker of the House and a presidential candidate himself in 2012, albeit not a very good one.
He'd wanted to be speaker since he first ran for Congress in 1974. He lost, then lost again in 1976, but won in 1978 and went on to become speaker in 1994, where he demanded to be a kind of "co-president" alongside then-president Bill Clinton.
But his rise burned out in 1998, when Republicans largely blamed Gingrich for a disastrous GOP performance during mid-term elections that year, and he resigned months later.
Reek
Reek's real name is Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey, who is constantly made fun of for never being in New Jersey.
A long time ago in a galaxy seemingly very far away, Christie was seen as the Republican candidate who could bridge the gap between the two parties and take the White House from the Democrats in 2016.
But then his staff orchestrated a massive amount of traffic in a small New Jersey borough as payback to the borough president for not endorsing him in his gubernatorial reelection campaign. After this occurred, Christie's chances dropped to the point that he was an afterthought from the moment he announced he was running for president.
He dropped out of the race early on and became one of the first former Trump rivals to endorse the candidate. He has since followed Trump around like a...well, like Reek, the Game of Thrones character who was once known by a different name (Theon Greyjoy) and held in high regard until being captured and tortured into submission.
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Mike Flynn
Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, someone Trump would pick if he decided he didn't care as much about having one of those Washington insiders he's always talking about.
Flynn would likely boost Trump's credibility in the realm of foreign policy, but the former general has some notably left-leaning thoughts on abortion (which he has hastily changed) and gay marriage, which have probably put him on the outside looking in. Flynn is also a registered Democrat.
Then again, Trump may also have a few left-leaning thoughts of his own, and he's reportedly into the idea of a businessman and a general taking over the top spots in the nation's capital.
Who knows?
Trump has said he has vice presidential candidates nobody knows about, so maybe the pick will be someone totally unexpected...?
Maybe it'll be former Denver Broncos and New York Jets and Florida Gators quarterback and soon-to-be Republican National Convention speaker Tim Tebow?
Maybe it'll be his daughter, Ivanka Trump? Or one of his sons?
Maybe it'll be one of those friends he always says back up his vague policy ideas?
Maybe it'll be the ghost of Ronald Reagan?
Maybe he'll print out each individual email Hillary Clinton sent as secretary of state, staple them into one massive packet, and declare that wad of paper his running mate?
Are any of these ideas really so out-there as to be unimaginable?
Is 2016 just a collective year-long mass-delusion?
The point is, who knows?
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Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
