Vox Sentences: The Trump veepstakes near their frenzied end in Indiana

Britain's new prime minister names her new Cabinet; what kind of VP does Donald Trump want?; more like Justice Ginsburghazi, amirite.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

May Day

Carl Court/Getty Images

• It's official: David Cameron is no longer prime minister of the United Kingdom; Theresa May has taken his place.

• In May's first speech, she promised to hold the UK together (no small feat, given concerns about Scottish and Northern Irish secession post-Brexit) and praised the legacy of her predecessor on "social justice" — proving that either "social justice" means something very different in Britain (like "jumper" or "biscuit") or "conservative" does.

  [The Guardian / Heather Stewart and Peter Walker]

• You are going to be hearing a lot of facile comparisons to Margaret Thatcher, the UK's last woman prime minister (and also a member of May's Conservative Party). Please resist them.

  [The Atlantic / Jamie Tarabay]

• And please don't make the mistake of assuming the Conservative Party must be a welcoming place for women just because it's been led twice by them — like most other political institutions, it has serious sexism problems.

  [New Statesman / Kate Maltby]

• While May is keeping one top Cabinet official of Cameron's, she's mostly appointing her own people.

  [The Guardian / Rowena Mason and Peter Walker]

• She's appointed a special Cabinet minister to handle Brexit — longtime Euroskeptic David Davis — dimming hopes that the UK might just forget about it entirely.

  [The Independent / Will Worley]

• But she's made it clear that her government needs "time to prepare," and has hinted that Davis and company won't start the formal secession process until next year.

  [Jim Waterson via Twitter]

• Boris Johnson, the former next prime minister of the UK, will be May's foreign secretary. Given that Johnson is mostly known for insulting other world leaders (including a bizarre dig at Barack Obama's Kenyan ancestry) this will be ... interesting.

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

Stuck in Indiana with the VP blues again

Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

• Donald Trump is expected to announce his running mate within the next few days. Top aide Paul Manafort, for one, says the VP announcement will come Friday in New York.

  [Philip Rucker via Twitter]

• There's cause to take Manafort's claim with a grain of salt. For one, what Manafort says isn't always what the campaign does. For another, it's clear that Trump hasn't yet decided whom he'll pick.

  [CNN / Dana Bash, Sara Murray, and Stephen Collinson]

• In a particularly farcical turn, Trump was stranded in Indiana Wednesday after his plane broke down, forcing potential VPs to come to him. That worked out well for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — the most conventional (read: boring) politician on the shortlist and the favorite of top Trump staffers, possibly because they imagine he'd be easiest to keep on message.

  [US News / David Catanese]

• The Trump children (particularly Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner), meanwhile, are reported to prefer former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. A Trump/Gingrich ticket would certainly be a ticket of big ideas, to put it kindly; to put it less kindly, as Rich Lowry writes, Gingrich's ability to "believe six impossible things before breakfast" makes him an ideal running mate to Trump.

  [Politico / Rich Lowry]

• Chris Christie is also still in the mix, raising suspicions that he's the favorite of Trump himself. Given that Trump has ritually humiliated Christie ever since the New Jersey governor endorsed him, this speaks to Trump's compulsive need to be surrounded by yes men and not a whole lot else.

  [Business Insider / Josh Barro]

• And then there's Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who's become a force in the campaign since becoming the first member of Congress to endorse Trump — and whose selection would be a reminder that Trump has always been an order of magnitude more serious about his immigration proposals than anything else in his campaign.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• This isn't a great list, largely because Trump has alienated plenty of other potential candidates. Then again, it's not clear that he wants to name a VP who'd be good for the ticket instead of being good for Trump.

The Indecorous RBG

Paul Morigi/Getty Images for ELLE

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg went on the record attacking Donald Trump Sunday, telling the New York Times's Adam Liptak she "can't imagine what the country would be" under a President Trump.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• This isn't a formal breach of judicial ethics. But it's certainly a violation of a norm: Supreme Court justices aren't expected to criticize the people whose administration they could end up serving alongside.

  [ABA Journal / Deborah Cassens Weiss]

• Donald Trump, of course, has never given a fig about democratic norms in his entire campaign, so his demand that Ginsburg resign over her comments is pretty rich.

  [WSJ / Brent Kendall]

• (His promise to "swamp" Ginsburg with "real judges and real opinions" is more characteristic, in that it is both a threat to damage the federal judiciary and wholly impractical.)

  [Donald Trump via Twitter]

• As coarse as Trump is, though, there's a solid argument that Ginsburg shouldn't have coarsened herself in turn. Even the New York Times editorial board is taking Trump's side on this one.

  [New York Times]

• Some progressives — like the New Republic's Brian Beutler — think the hand-wringing is overwrought. To them, the Supreme Court has revealed over the past several years that it really is a political institution, and there's not much of a veil of impartiality to tear away.

  [New Republic / Brian Beutler]

• Even so, that might not make it a good idea for judges themselves to do the tearing — as the Washington Post's Dan Drezner argues.

  [Washington Post / Dan Drezner]

• One unsettling possibility: It seems likely that this controversy wouldn't have gotten so much traction if "the Notorious RBG" hadn't developed such a cult of personality among young liberals. Is it possible she is beginning to play to this image and buy into her own hype?

  [Vox / Tez Clark]

MISCELLANEOUS

Eight Olympians — including sprinter/Black Power saluter John Carlos, soccer star Natasha Kai, and diver Greg Louganis — tell Vox what it was like to adjust to life after the games. [Vox / Various]

• Most economists think monopolies impose relatively small costs on the economy. A new wave of research suggests that's wrong, that monopolies are deeply inefficient and mismanaged, and that they particularly hurt the poor.

  [Minneapolis Fed / James Schmitz]

• FiveThirtyEight has an excellent graphic making it easy to break down gun deaths in the US by cause, and by the age/race/gender of the victim. The big takeaways: The vast majority of deaths are suicides, and victims of gun suicide tend to be older men.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Ben Casselman, Matthew Conlen, and Reuben Fischer-Baum]

• A Phillips Exeter student told the school minister she'd been sexually assaulted. His solution: have her assailant bake her bread and deliver it for a year.

  [Boston Globe / Jenn Abelson]

• The Senate confirmed Carla Hayden to be the next librarian of Congress Wednesday. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about Hayden — for one, she'll be the first actual librarian to hold the post.

  [US News / Alex Duner]

VERBATIM

"His 'Pickle with a Purpose' endeavor aims to provide everyone who experienced childhood trauma on 9/11 with access to transcendental meditation. The pickles are pretty good." [Eater / Malcolm Harris]

• "The intrafamily acrimony was such that Mr. Kushner retaliated against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with federal authorities, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him. He then arranged to have a secretly recorded videotape of the encounter sent to his sister, the man's wife."

  [NYT / Ronald Smothers]

• "Portugaria is America a few hours ago, because of the time difference. Its people are a simple people, a throwback people, like Americans but a few hours ago."

  [New Yorker / Rachel Axler]

• "I think we value our children less than other nations do. I don’t have an easier or softer or kinder way to say that."

  [Arne Duncan to the Hechinger Report / Lillian Mongeau]

• "You are the only person left on earth not in grad school or without children. You run."

  [McSweeney's / Mike Lacher]

WATCH THIS

Why so many queer female characters die on TV [YouTube / Estelle Caswell, Caroline Framke, and Danush Parvaneh]

Mutant Enemy Productions

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