Here’s his lesson for young minds: If you’re rich and boorish enough, you can get away with anything. Get away with sexual assault. Get away with not paying taxes. Get away with never telling the truth. Get away flirting with treason. Get away with stiffing people who work for you, while you take yours. Get away with mocking the disabled, veterans and families of war heroes.
.. Trump has made compassion suspect. Don’t reach out to starving refugees — they’re killers in disguise. Don’t give to a charity that won’t reward you in some way. Don’t pay taxes that build roads and offer relief to those washed away in a hurricane. That’s a sucker’s game. We’re not all in this together. Taxes are for stupid people.
Pence refuses to respond on Trump’s comments
The GOP VP nominee dodges reporters asking about Trump making the most aggressive, crude comments about women yet
TOLEDO, Ohio — Mike Pence took the stage here just over an hour after a tape emerged of Donald Trump crudely bragging about sexually harassing women and pretended as though no such tape existed.
.. “How can you ignore this question?” an ABC reporter asked repeatedly, as Pence simply smiled and shook hands.
.. “Governor, what’s your reaction to the Trump tape?” Pence was asked by POLITICO as he shook hands and an aide whisper over his shoulder. “Governor, The Washington Post report, what is your reaction?”
Pence simply kept shaking hands, moving down the line.
.. At the rally, Pence stuck to his usual stump speech, including a section in which he criticizes the media for focusing on some of Trump’s controversial past comments.
“And invariably, they’ll say, this time we got him, right? This time we found that there’s another tweet come out or something,” Pence said. “This time we got another thing, another issue that’s come forward. Then they turn on the television the next morning, and Donald Trump is still standing stronger than ever before and fighting for the American people. And he is going to fight all the way to the White House.”
Mike Pence’s Defense Strategy: Dodge and Deflect Donald Trump’s Words
When his Democratic rival, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, delivered a scorching rebuke of Mr. Trump’s affection for autocrats like Vladimir V. Putin and Saddam Hussein, both of whom he has praised, Mr. Pence, the governor of Indiana, looked over, weighed the message and promptly changed the subject.
“Did you work on that one a long time?” Mr. Pence mischievously asked his rival. “Because that had a lot of really creative lines in it.”
.. In Mr. Pence’s telling, it was the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, not Mr. Trump, who was running the “insult-driven campaign.”
.. Pressed on Mr. Trump’s startling and unsubstantiated claim that Mexico was sending rapists and criminals to the United States, Mr. Pence protested that his running mate had called some of those immigrants “good people.”
.. All running mates eventually play the role of human shield, sacrificing a measure of dignity and putting their future political prospects in jeopardy to protect the person at the top of the ticket.
.. In almost every conceivable way, he is Mr. Trump’s polar opposite: deeply religious, instinctively civil and conspicuously cautious — as at ease quoting from Scripture as Mr. Trump is mocking a woman’s physique.
.. Both were raised Roman Catholic — though Mr. Pence later became an evangelical Christian — in middle-class Midwestern families of Irish ancestry. Both have sons serving in the Marines.
.. When Mr. Kaine reminded Mr. Pence, once again, of Mr. Trump’s denigrating description of immigrants from Mexico, Mr. Pence could hardly muster a reply. “You whipped out that Mexican thing again,” he observed, sounding more like an analyst than a participant in the debate.
Mike Pence’s Fantasy Running Mate
Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana faced on Tuesday night, as he labored to defend Donald Trump, a nominee with contempt for many of the principles, much of the policy agenda and all of the dignity of the Republican Party that Mr. Pence cherishes.
.. He set out to invent a new version of Donald Trump, one that he could believe in.
.. Mr. Pence simply ignored the Donald Trump we have seen on the trail for more than a year — the one who would build a wall against Mexico, the one who would disregard our security treaties and tear up our trade agreements, the one with a crush on Vladimir Putin — and instead dreamed up a more conventional, right-wing Republican, a Republican, that is, very like Mike Pence.
.. Since then, Mr. Pence has been engaged in the same compromising maneuvers that Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, the House speaker, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, have been performing almost daily since they reluctantly embraced their party’s standard-bearer.
.. Mr. Pence resorted at times to repeating some of Mr. Trump’s own thin claims, including his preposterous justification for not releasing his tax returns.
.. And he simply ducked rather than try to address questions about Mr. Trump’s egregious attacks on women and minorities; instead, he accused the Democrats of unleashing “an avalanche of insults” on his running mate.