With all eyes on Mike Pence after his speech at the RNC yesterday, we examine the past 6 months of his tenure as the leader of the task force coronavirus – and what it all means for his political future.
During all this, the President himself is largely confined to evening videos of set-pieces where he is uncharacteristically restricted in his remarks. His Twitter feed is relatively tame and dominated by reposts from convention videos. At the end of Pence’s speech Wednesday, Trump was seen but not heard.
Pence is the ultimate avatar for this strategy. He is at the same time the most and least Trump man in America. Pence is famously submissive, obsequious and loyal to the president. By Trump’s command, the VP once left a football game between the San Francisco Forty-Niners and the Indianapolis Colts, his home team, to protest against players who protested.
At a White House briefing earlier this year, when Pence silently sided with him, Trump told reporters that his own “authority is total.” I was in the room and I asked Pence if he agreed. The vice president, who has said his main political influences are Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Russell Kirk, three intellectual architects of the conservative movement of the small government of America, stepped to the microphone and answered. “Make no mistake about it: in the long history of this country, the authority of the President of the United States during national emergencies is unmistakably plenary,” he said, meaning unqualified as absolute. So much for Hayek.
But Pence’s personal justice, lack of pizzas, religiosity and modest finances have also made him the most un-Trump person in the administration. It was precisely this contrast that in the first place had attracted Trump’s advisers to Pence as a running mate. The candidate was in the polls in July of 2016 and widely seen as deeply unserious, immoral and unprecedented. Pence was the antidote to all of that, but Trump wanted Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, to suffer through the Bridgegate scandal. Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, was so convinced of Pence’s benefits that when the team was in Indianapolis, he made up a story about Trump’s plane needing repair so Trump could spend more time with Pence and kill Christie. The ruse worked.
And so in 2020, Pence, who as vice president can go long distances without ever hearing of it, was once again front and center yesterday with the argument that Trump is the caricature and Trump the president are two different people.
“I saw him when the cameras were off,” Pence said, suggesting that Trump is behind the scenes, and in contrast to the accounts of dozens of former administration officials, is not.
If we put aside the merits of Pence’s character management of Trump, his argument for a second term on Wednesday night was the best distillation of what the GOP is trying to achieve this week. First, he presented the best case scenario for the performance of the Trump administration: an improved military (he “created the Space Force”), a (once) roaring economy, the defeat of ISIS, a reformed Veterans Department, the approval of the Senate of more than 200 federal judges.
During her debate in Utah on October 7, Kamala Harris will quickly respond to Pence that all these achievements, except for the judges, were simply the continuation of circumstances or policies inherited from Obama. But a lot has happened on the watch of the current administration to burst over in the context of a political campaign – more than many critics on the left are willing to admit.
In Pence’s account, this glowing record was then interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, which is true. The part of his speech where things get very foggy is his discussion of the response to the pandemic. There is a recitation of some actions taken, heartfelt sympathy for the victims of the disease, pains to health care workers, and a promise to open up the country and restore the old Trump economy. But there was no acknowledgment that the pandemic was still raging and no details of a plan to stop it.
Instead, Pence changed the subject.
Pence’s case for Trump-Pence turned abruptly after the anti-racism protests, which is now at the heart of the message of the Trump campaign and is worth mentioning.
‘My fellow Americans, we’re going through a time of testing. “In the midst of this global pandemic, just as our people began to recover, we saw violence and chaos in the streets of our great cities,” he said. “President Donald Trump and I will always support the right of Americans to peaceful protest, but rioting and looting is not a peaceful protest. Canceling images is not free speech. Those who do so will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“Last week, Joe Biden did not say a word about the violence and chaos that is overcoming cities in this country. Let me be clear: Violence must stop – or in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha. Too many heroes have died defending our freedoms to see Americans beat each other. We will have law and order on the streets of America. ”
The conventional wisdom is that Trump is doomed. Many swing voters think he is annoying and unfit to be president. His bungling of the Covid disaster is not something that can be overcome with PR Attitudes about race of many Americans, which he hopes would turn against Black Lives Matter, are more progressive than he understood. Biden and Harris have successfully defined themselves at the center and avoided unpopular tribunes over immigration, removing the police and removing private health insurance.
Pence’s speech tried to address all of that. Could it work? At this point in 2016, Trump was equally thought not to vote. But his last weeks were marked by at least some reporting discipline introduced by his third campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and he received enormous electoral gifts from James Comey, Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin. Voters are cautious and many only pay attention in the final weeks of the campaign when the full Trump makeup will be in effect. Trump has a national election deficit of 7-8 points, but the race will intensify soon, as is often the case after conventions, and Trump may lose the popular vote by 4-5 points and still win Electoral College. Several pro-Biden pollsters have recently warned that the sporadic urban violence that Pence marked is beginning to appear in polls in ways that hurt Democrats. In short, yes, Pence’s case for Trump could work. They could win re-election.
But whatever happens, Pence has now become Trump’s ultimate true believer.
In May 2019, Pence delivered the starting address to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. As a White House liaison to the evangelical community, Pence had found a natural audience of Trump base voters to wave (although I think we now know that there was at least one swing voter, too). He told students a story about how when he was in college and broke free from the Catholicism of his youth and embraced evangelical Christianity, he told a friend at a Christian community that he wanted to buy a cross.
“Hi man, you know, I’ve decided to continue with the Christian thing,” Pence told the friend. “That, I want to get one of those crosses you wear, so let me know where you have it.”
With words Pence said he would never forget, the friend looked him in the eye and replied, “Mike, you know, you have to wear it in your heart before you wear it around your neck.”
A similar question about Pence’s dedication to Trumpism has always hung over Pence’s vice presidency. But yesterday Pence proved that MAGA is not just something he has on his mind. He also carries it in his heart.
