What Donald Trump is looking for in vice presidential pick
Making the morning show rounds after his sweeping Tuesday night victory in Indiana, Donald Trump said he's looking a vice presidential pick with a different set of skills than his own.
"I have the business -- let's call it talents," Trump, now the likely nominee after Cruz's exit from the race, told MSNBC early Wednesday. "I think I'll probably go the political route, somebody that can help me with legislation and somebody that can help me get things passed and somebody that's been friends with the senators and the congressman and all."
It's just one indication that Trump's general election strategy will include extending a few olive branches to the Republican party, an institution that he's been at odds with for the past several weeks.
In the same interview, the billionaire -- who took great pride in claims that he was "self-funding" his primary campaign -- promised that he would escalate fundraising efforts for the GOP.
"I really won't be asking for money for myself," Trump said. "I'll be asking money for the party. And really, it's something that we're going to start on right away."
Asked whether, in an election race against Clinton, he would welcome the support of super PACs, Trump said that he would consider it and will "be making a decision over the next week."
He also mentioned his Tuesday night phone call with Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, who told "CBS This Morning" that it was time to rally around Trump as the "presumptive nominee."
But Trump admits that he doesn't think it's "imperative" to unite the whole of the Republican party.
"I don't want everybody," he said, giving a nod to some of his most ardent GOP critics. "I don't even want certain people that were extraordinarily nasty. Let them go their own way. Let them wait eight years or let them wait 16 years or whatever."
Though for some like Cruz, who has called the Manhattan mogul "utterly amoral" and "a pathological liar," Trump said he would still want to win the Texas senator over to his side.
"I would certainly expect to be talking to Ted," Trump said in an interview with NBC's "Today Show" on Wednesday. He admitted that he didn't care if others could put aside all the inflammatory rhetoric of the primary season -- but, Trump said, "in Ted's case, I hope" that would be the case.
But his conciliatory language toward Cruz didn't cause him to reconsider what he said about Cruz's father Tuesday, when he linked him to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
"All I was doing was referring to was a picture reported and in a magazine and I think they didn't deny it," Trump said of the National Enquirer story he had cited. "I don't think anybody denied it," he said on ABC News' "Good Morning America."
"You can't knock the National Enquirer. It's brought many things to light, not all of them pleasant," he continued, referring to the tabloid's coverage of O.J. Simpson and of John Edwards.
Ted Cruz, for his part, denied Tuesday that his father ever associated with Oswald, calling the charges "nuts" and "kooky" during a press conference.
Trump's pivot to the general election race also hasn't moderated his policy positions yet. He stood by his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country, an idea he floated in December, saying that he didn't care if it made him unpopular among general election voters.
"We have to be extremely careful and we have to be vigilant. Yes, we have to find out what the hell is going on," Trump said when pressed about the Muslim ban. Asked if the proposal would harm him in November, he added, "I really don't know if it hurts me. I don't care if it hurts me. I'm doing the right thing when I do this."