The man takes up very little space, and undoubtedly this was his great appeal to Donald Trump, one of the great oxygen consumers of our time.
.. Mr. Pence was elected governor of Indiana in 2012 with less than 50 percent of the vote. Many of the politicos I talked to in Indiana described him as ambitious for the sake of ambition, with no ideological compass other than his evangelical Christianity. They thought that, unlike the previous governor, Mitch Daniels, Mr. Pence was interested in the job mainly to check off executive experience on his presidential-candidate résumé.
.. an earlier congressional bid exploded when he used campaign funds to pay his mortgage — where he passed exactly zero bills that became law but frequently introduced legislation to defund Planned Parenthood.
.. Mr. Pence wrote in 2001 that the link between smoking and cancer was not proved
.. Most observers thought he won the vice-presidential debate with Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia by sticking to his talking points, no matter their relationship with reality. (PolitiFact ruled that over 40 percent of Mr. Pence’s statements were either false or mostly false.)
The Threat in President Trump’s Interview with Lester Holt
President Trump is a selfish liar, and a vain one. Those traits, together, can cause chaos, as they did on Thursday, when, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump undermined his own alibi for firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey
- Vice-President Mike Pence and other dependents repeated this story all day Wednesday, with Pence portraying the President as solemnly resolved to follow the best advice he had, and
- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, throwing in some smears of Comey, who she said had committed “atrocities” while at the F.B.I. and was disliked by its rank and file.
.. But, when Holt asked him about heeding Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump seemed to bristle. Could Holt think that he, Trump, needed to hear what anyone had to say—that he had his mind changed by subordinates?
.. “when I decided to just do it”—that is, to fire Comey: “I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.” His aides, needless to say, had spent the day saying that Comey’s firing had nothing to do with Russia.
.. Instead, it leaves open the possibility that some sort of public confession in which Comey would “admit his errors” might be an alternative, in terms of restoring “trust.”
.. Instead, in both the letter that Trump sent to Comey and in his interview with Holt, Trump claimed that he got something else from Comey: an assurance that he was not under investigation. Trump doesn’t bother to conceal that he regarded such an assurance as something of a condition of employment.
.. Trump would rather raise the possibility that he’d had an improper, if not actually illegal, conversation with Comey than leave anyone with the impression that he couldn’t instruct the people who worked for him to do anything he desired.
.. Trump seems to treat the idea of being investigated the same way that he regards the idea of losing money. He is not personally being investigated; he never personally declared bankruptcy—only some of his various businesses did.
.. McCabe added that he personally regarded serving with Comey as the honor of his life. Sanders countered that many F.B.I. officers of her acquaintance had told her the opposite, which she treated as definitive despite adding, with a note of pleased and oblivious self-contradiction, “And I don’t even know that many people in the F.B.I.!”
.. She answered questions about the propriety of the Trump-Comey dinner by seeming to cite lawyers she’d seen comment on television.
.. In a way, she is the perfect Trump spokesperson. Her incoherent answers revolved around the greatness of Trump and the perfidy of his enemies.
Conservatives begin to whisper: President Pence
With Trump swamped by self-inflicted scandals, Republicans find solace in the man waiting in the wings.
Lobbyists who set up meetings between Pence and their clients must warn them that the vice president may be an hour and a half late or have to leave after 10 minutes because Trump is constantly calling him into the Oval Office to confer with him
.. Almost like a reminder of Pence’s political ambitions, news broke on Wednesday that Pence had formed a new leadership political action committee called the Great America Committee. It is unusual for a vice president to form his own PAC, as the vice president would traditionally merge his political operation with the Republican National Committee.
Get Ready for the Pillorying of Pence
If Trump leaves office prematurely for any reason, President Pence will immediately be denounced as far worse. In fact, it would happen before he even took office. In fact it’s already happening. That this is true is testament to the fundamentally unprincipled nature of the Left.
.. I have long concurred with many of the points the Left makes about Trump, and some of those points are becoming more salient by the day. He really does seem frighteningly erratic, unprepared, sloppy. It’s hard to believe he would provide reassuring leadership in the event of a foreign-policy crisis. And it’s possible he committed obstruction of justice with respect to James Comey’s investigation of Michael Flynn.
.. His promotion would make progressives reach for the old playbook: Attack as a dangerous theocrat who hates women, minorities, and gays.
.. Opposition to abortion, or even opposition to government funds being directed to the nation’s leading abortion provider, will be recast as posing a supreme danger to “women’s health.”
.. But Pence will be called even more abnormal because he deflects questions about evolution as beyond his pay grade.
.. the ludicrous attempt to tie the secular, non-moralizing Trump to the neo-Puritan misogynist dystopia imagined in the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale will be recharged
.. Pence will be labeled an extremist for being part of the American Christian majority.