Mike Pence’s dead-end endgame
After last night’s New York Times op-ed detailed just how mentally incompetent Donald Trump is, how out of control his White House is, and how the cabinet considered invoking the 25th Amendment to oust him, a lot of people just assumed it was engineered by Mike Pence. That suspicion heightened when people began recalling that “lodestar,” the most unusual word in the op-ed, had been used by Pence many times before. But what kind of endgame are we even looking at here?
Whether Mike Pence was involved in the publication of the op-ed or not, the scandal has freshly raised the question of what Pence would stand to gain – or more likely lose – if he inherited the presidency at this point. As the Trump-Russia criminal scandal has gotten worse and the Trump administration has further unraveled, Pence has largely tried to lay low. That doesn’t keep federal investigators off your tail, but it does cause the public to keep forgetting you’re there, thus keeping the public from focusing as strongly on trying to oust you.
So let’s say, hypothetically, that Donald Trump resigns or is indeed forced out by the 25th Amendment, and Mike Pence takes over tomorrow. Take a look at the fierce current pushback against anti-woman, anti-rights, anti-justice conservative extremist Brett Kavanaugh, and that’ll give you an idea of the kind of pushback you’d see against a newly promoted “President Pence.” Trump is a mentally deranged person on a human level, but Pence has mentally deranged views on every political and ideological issue.
Anyone ambitious enough to want to become President is probably arrogant enough to think they can succeed as President, no matter the circumstances. But Mike Pence would be walking into a buzzsaw. The mainstream media would spend three weeks talking about how our long national nightmare is over because Pence is mild mannered, and then the media would look around at the public upheaval, and decide to quickly shift toward covering Pence’s scandals.
It wouldn’t take long at all for Mike Pence’s lies about Michael Flynn to become a primary focus. Don’t forget that Flynn has already cut a plea deal and spilled his guts to Robert Mueller, who can spring that information at any time. The media might even finally focus on the fact that Kremlin asset and convicted felon Paul Manafort bent over backward, possibly at Vladimir Putin’s instruction, to convince Trump to pick a fairly obscure and fairly unpopular Governor of Indiana as his running mate.
Mike Pence would quickly become as scandalized as Trump has been. Moreover, Pence would promptly face impossible decisions about whether to try to fire Mueller, who is surely going to make a move on Pence’s Trump-Russia obstruction of justice at some point. That’s before getting to the part where the Democrats take one or both houses of Congress in November, and begin launching one investigation into Pence’s scandals after another. Somewhere in there, Pence would have to decide whether to lose Trump’s base by not pardoning Trump, or to completely destroy himself by pardoning Trump.
Are these the kind of circumstances under which anyone would want to inherit the remainder of an illegitimate presidential term? Mike Pence’s best hope in all this would be to quietly remain in his current role and hope that Donald Trump can somehow finish out the term, and then disappear entirely, in the hope that in all the chaos, no one will get around to indicting him for obstruction. The minute Pence inherits the presidency, he’s already at a no-win dead end. If Trump is about to be ousted, Pence’s best bet would be to cut a deal to resign.
