Aloha, buonasera, and Happy Father’s Day from Gotham City to all you poppas (and mommas and kiddos lucky enough to have a good dad in their world) out there. In tonight’s edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, my indignant and unrestrained rant regarding the abject asininity of one of the longest-standing and most inescapable quadrennial rituals in our politics—the veepstakes.

But first …

💔R.I.P., Jamal: The restaurant world was stunned to learn last night that one of its fastest-rising and most beloved stars, Jamal James Kent, had died at the age of 45. (At this hour, the cause of death has yet to be reported.) James was a dear friend of mine and a huge supporter of The Circus, letting us use his joints—the restaurants Crown Shy and Saga and the bar Overstory—in the majestic Art Deco building at 70 Pine St. in New York’s Financial District repeatedly as locations on the show. Indeed, we shot the final scene of the series from Saga’s balcony, with its sweeping views of the five boroughs.

Jamal was widely seen in the hospitality industry as a man on the way to global renown; you can read all about why in the obits here and here. And you can hear more on Tuesday’s episode of Impolitic with John Heilemann, where I’ll be talking with restaurant legend Danny Meyer about Jamal and much more. Also, be sure to check out Friday’s episode, which will feature a deep dive with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon.

And now for that running-mate rant…

In the 72 years since then, the importance of the veepstakes hasn’t changed one iota—i.e., with one notable exception, who’s in the No. 2 slot on a presidential ticket didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now. But the coverage of the sidekick selection process by the political press—the speculation surrounding it (who’s supposedly on or off the shortlist, whose stock is purportedly rising or falling, the nominee’s alleged appraisal criteria, etcetera) by the political class more broadly, and the attendant efforts at subterfuge, misdirection, and dissimulation by the campaigns to throw the media off the scent and gin up suspense/surprise about the eventual pick—have escalated and metastasized like those speedball zombies in World War Z.

All of which would be fine, I guess, if witnessing the veepstakes unfold like clockwork every four years was nearly as entertaining as watching undead wraiths chase Brad Pitt around the globe, or even as politically edifying. But, alas, quite the opposite is the case. In fact, as we approach my ninth time (!!!) covering this particular sideshow of the presidential circus, I’ve finally reached the stage where I’m prepared to bestow a designation for which, until now, there has always been way too much competition to make a definitive call. Ready? Here goes: By the power vested in me by no one other than myself, I officially declare the veepstakes—and the mindless, clueless, witless, pointless media clusterfuck around it—to be the most inane and insipid of Washington’s panoply of inane and insipid political rituals.

Voters in presidential elections vote for the top of the ticket, end of story. As for the effect of sitting veeps on the policies and practices of the administrations they serve: what their staff will tell you (and, after one too many glasses of Cabernet, what they will tell you) after leaving office is that the experience of being V.P. amounts on good days to being ignored by their bosses and on bad days to something worse; that the famous John Nance Garner line about the vice presidency not being “worth a bucket of warm piss” is, if anything, an overstatement of its value.

At this point, it doesn’t take much imagination to conjure images of some of you reading this and either scratching your heads or shouting at your screens: “Hold on a minute—aren’t you the Game Change guy? If running mates and vice presidents don’t matter, why’d you devote so much ink to Sarah Palin?”

Yes, I am that guy, and it’s a perfectly reasonable question, which brings us back to the notable exception I alluded to earlier. The selection of a running mate does matter in one crucial respect: as a window into the judgment, values, and character of the nominee doing the selecting. With his pick, the nominee is making the only choice he or she faces before taking office that could have tangible (potentially huge) consequences afterward: the choice of the person who will succeed him if he dies or is incapacitated in office. So the question of whether the nominee has taken that choice seriously and made it responsibly—tapping a V.P. who is, in every respect, ready to be POTUS from day one—deserves rigorous scrutiny from the press and evaluation by voters.

But, ahem, how exactly is the cause of that kind of scrutiny advanced by endless stories about a penumbra of potential running mates, all but one of whom won’t be on the ticket? Never mind that the vast majority of those stories are related to rigorous journalistic scrutiny in much the same way The 1975 are related to The Clash. Type “veepstakes” into Google tonight and behold a cornucopia of speculation, superficiality, and inside-baseball blah blah blah—from the New York Post (Inside Trump’s veepstakes: Top contender falls down shortlist, about Tim Scott) to ABC News (Bill Hagerty latest to be floated in Trump veepstakes) to the Washington Times (‘Shark Tank’ judge Kevin O’Leary backs Burgum in Trump veepstakes)—most of it thinly sourced, some of it clearly made up, and essentially all of it destined to be digital fish wrap the moment Trump actually makes his pick.

Then there’s the fact that even veepstakes pieces by excellent reporters with tons of sources inside Trumpland are hobbled by all of the requisite qualifiers when writing about anything the former president might do in the future. Take this story by Marc Caputo—a friend of mine, and someone whose work I greatly admire—in The Bulwark. Being wise to the vicissitudes of Trump’s addled mind, Caputo writes, “Trump is nowhere near finalizing a decision. No one knows whom he’ll pick. (It could be [Doug Burgum, J.D. Vance, or Marco Rubio]. Or one of the other eight. Or a wild card.) Nor is Trump’s timeline clear.” Caputo then quotes a source saying, “He’s going to make the decision three times and change his decision three times, and do it whenever he wants. And we won’t know until he makes the announcement himself.” And then he reminds us of these and other “caveats and qualifiers” before laying out what “insiders say about the pros and cons” of Burgum, Vance, and Rubio.

I’m as certain as I can be from a distance that Caputo’s reporting is accurate. But I’m equally certain that the very necessity of all of those “caveats and qualifiers” highlights the fundamental and overarching futility—even for the most scrupulous and plugged-in reporters—of attempting to tackle the Trump veepstakes story in a fashion that benefits… well, anyone, really.

The deeper problem is this: After crapping on Mike Pence for four straight years, on January 6 he first fed his V.P. to a pack of wolves whose intent was to lynch him on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, then reportedly declared in the White House that day, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. … [Pence] deserves it,” and now refers to those who wanted to string Pence up as “warriors” and victims of a “setup” and pledges to pardon them if elected.

On the basis of Trump’s treatment of Pence, we already understand everything there is to know about the nominee. But Trump’s readiness, and perhaps even eagerness in the moment, to see his No. 2 killed—and yes, typing those words feels every bit as lunatic as you might imagine, but facts are facts, folks—also tells us something essential about the ostensible shortlisters currently bowing and scraping before him and the MAGA base: Not a single one of them, on the face of it, is qualified for the job… since anyone who’d take a gig working for a boss who incited a mob that threatened to string up the previous occupant of the post is undeniably and categorically unready to be president from day one.

Indeed, anyone who would consider taking that job shouldn’t be allowed within hailing distance of the Oval Office—he or she belongs on a psychiatrist’s couch instead. And set against that backdrop, it seems to me, every word written or uttered about this year’s veepstakes is, to quote some old dead dude with a sharper pen than mine, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”