The intrigue over who Donald Trump will pick to be his vice president on the 2024 Republican ticket he's presumed to be leading is growing. A recent report placed Rep. Elise Stefanik, a moderate House member from New York, near the top of the list. 

READ: Donald Trump Is Considering a Vice Presidential Pick That Could Prove Very Controversial

Then there's Nikki Haley, who has reportedly been under consideration for a while, even as she remains in the primary race. On that front, when the Trump campaign had a chance to put the Nikki Haley issue to bed once and for all, they chose not to, instead only ruling out Vivek Ramaswamy.

What that says is that the former president's closest advisors haven't been permitted to do so, meaning Haley is very much in play. If that weren't the case, they'd just nuke the idea and be done with it. That's not lost on Megyn Kelly, who shared her theory on what could go down while speaking to Dave Rubin. 

“Is it out of the realm of possibility that he chooses Haley? Absolutely not. It’s not. I realize that MAGA doesn’t want it. They’ve convinced themselves that Nikki Haley is against all the things that they stand for,” Kelly tells Dave Rubin.

However, Trump has to do what he has to do in order to win, and Haley might be the winning ticket.

“He personally really must win if he doesn’t want to go to jail,” Kelly explains. “If that’s your situation, I think you might be thinking, ‘MAGA is gonna get over Nikki Haley if I tell them to get over Nikki Haley.’"

She's right. I don't want her to be right. I'd like to believe Trump supporters and Republicans more broadly would revolt if Nikki Haley were placed on the ticket. They won't, though. If Trump says to accept her, everyone will accept her. The same people calling her a neoconservative war-monger right now will start rationalizing her presence on the ticket. 

Heck, you see right there in the article quoted above where the writer (from a very anti-Haley outlet) mentions "Haley might be the winning ticket" so that Trump can "do what he has to do in order to win." Those kinds of justifications won't be hard to come up with if that's the direction the former president goes.

Because of that, picking Haley may make a lot of sense. Unlike Stefanik, she does bring a completely different voting pool to the equation, which is what you want from a vice president. The point is to grow the tent to secure a coalition large enough to win. Like it or not, Haley can appeal to suburban women and she will drag the donor class who might be looking to sit out back into the race kicking and screaming.

That goes hand-in-hand with Kelly's point about staying out of jail. No doubt, Trump recognizes the stakes of this election not just for the country, but for him. If he thinks Haley can be an asset, drawing in independents, why wouldn't he pick her? For all the consternation it would cause, it would take a week at most for the base of the party to fall in line and accept it as a necessary compromise. That's the easy part for Trump. The hard part is parlaying all this maneuvering into a general election victory. 

Does Kelly know for sure Haley is the pick? Obviously not, but her logic combined with the signals we've received so far says that conservatives should prepare for the possibility. If you think Trump wouldn't pick Haley just because he called her "birdbrain" a few times, think again.