President-elect Donald Trump gave serious consideration to naming Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo as his running mate but was talked out of it by aides because there wasn’t enough time to subject her to a vetting process, according to a new book.
Trump “was dead serious about Bartiromo and was making the case for her during the flight to Butler (Pennsylvania),” Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt wrote in his new book “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.”
“She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team,” according to Isenstadt. An excerpt of the book, which was published by Grand Central Publishing and will go on sale March 18, was reported by CNN.
Trump survived the first of two assassination attempts during an appearance at a campaign rally in Butler on July 13. Two days later, the president-elect announced that he was picking Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) to be his vice president.
When reached by The Post, the Trump transition team did not specifically address the claim that Bartiromo, host of the daily “Mornings with Maria” on Fox Business Network, was among the possible candidates for the No. 2 job.
“Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told The Post.
“There is nobody who is a better and stronger defender of the America First agenda, and he will continue to be a leader of the movement for years to come.”
The Post has sought comment from Fox Business Network and Bartiromo.
According to Isenstadt, the Brooklyn-born Bartiromo was a “Trump favorite” because she frequently defended him on air and conducted what he called “numerous softball interviews with him over the years, including his first on-air sit-down following the 2020 election, for which she had given his team a heads-up on her questions ahead of time.”
But when Trump kept pushing the idea of bringing Bartiromo onto the ticket, he was told that there was “no time to vet Bartiromo, as they had spent months doing with other candidates.”
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, “put an end to the conversation,” according to CNN.
Isenstadt also claimed in his book that Trump’s campaign was given the exact wording of the questions he would be asked at a Fox News town hall that took place in January of last year.
The town hall, which was moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, took place in Des Moines, Iowa.
According to Isenstadt’s book, Trump aides didn’t want the president-elect to appear at the town hall because they were “still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic, and did not want the former president to do the prime time event.”
But Trump agreed to the town hall because he “had a good relationship with Baier — they were golf buddies — and wanted to do a sit-down.”
A half hour before the town hall was set to begin, a senior aide “started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox,” Isenstadt wrote.
“Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt wrote.
Baier and MacCallum asked Trump tough questions about his criminal indictments as well as whether he would “disavow political violence” if he were to be re-elected.
“Trump was pissed,” Isenstadt wrote, because he felt the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive.”
But “with the questions in hand” ahead of the telecast, the team “workshopped answers.”
“While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a Fox News spokesperson told The Post.
A source familiar with the inner workings of the network told The Post that “if there was a breach, it was not from Bret or Martha or the top editorial levels of the network and there is a sophisticated and extensive digital footprint of all editorial material.”
Fox News and Fox Business are subsidiaries of Fox Corp — sister company to The Post’s corporate parent News Corp.
