Anyone telling you they know who Donald Trump is going to pick as his running mate is lying to you. That’s because Trump himself has no idea who he’s going to pick as his VP. He’s just as lost as everyone else.

What we do know is that he’d fail his own vetting process, but more on that later. First, let’s look at the con game Trump is using to keep himself in the headlines.

His short list is Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, likely in that order. But Trump is playing a shell game, using misdirection, “crazy Ivans” and other ruses to point us all over the map. Maybe he is just throwing spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks–how the press and the GOP react.

It could be like the daughter who calls home from college to tell dad she’s pregnant by a biker named Crush, and needs money to bail him out of jail, then to move in with him in the single-wide he shares with his other baby-mama. Then she says that no, she just failed biology and probably has to take summer classes–and by the way can she have $100?

Trump presents Flynn for shock value, so the party will sigh with relief when the real VP pick is Christie or Pence. I personally prefer Gingrich, who’s the only one I’ve seen actually display testicular fortitude in standing up to the Boss. But that in itself probably disqualifies Gingrich, for obvious reasons.

Uber-GOP lawyer A.B. Culvahouse, Jr. is doing the final vetting for Trump. This is the same lawyer who vetted Sarah Palin for John McCain. We saw how well that worked out, although Culvahouse claimed that Palin disclosed everything, and McCain went with the “high risk, high reward” option.

Like everything else the dilettante does, Trump will play his VP pick like three-card-monty, except even he doesn’t know where the money card is until he makes his final choice. But in the biggest irony of this race so far, Trump’s VP hopefuls will have to submit to everything the candidate himself avoids.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2012, [Culvahouse] described how deep the vetting dive goes, demanding the potential picks hand over their “tax returns, medical histories, financial statements, court records” while answering very personal questions about “infidelity, sexual harassment, discrimination, plagiarism, alcohol or drug addiction, delinquent taxes, credit history, and use of government positions or resources for personal benefit.”

Trump would fail his own vetting for VP. Perhaps the delegates in Cleveland should hold Trump to the same standards to which his lawyer holds his VP pick?