Mike Pence blows it badly

| 12:12 pm EDT September 10, 2018
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Donald Trump is obsessed with tracking down which senior member(s) of his administration wrote the infamous and anonymous New York Times op-ed, and for a few very plausible reasons, a whole lot of people out there think Mike Pence was in on it. That’s prompted Pence to get out there and publicly defend Trump, in the hope of convincing Trump that he wasn’t in on it. But let’s just say that Pence blew it.

Mike Pence said this remark on Fox News on Sunday, and then he made a point of tweeting it as well: “I spend about four hours a day with @POTUS when we’re both in Washington, D.C., every day – and what I see is a tough leader, a demanding leader, someone who gets all the options on the table, but he makes the decisions. And that’s why we’ve made the progress we’ve made.” The problem here is that we can prove he’s lying.

Earlier this year Axios famously published Donald Trump’s internal schedule, revealing that Donald Trump spends his morning alone in the residence, watching cable news and working on his tweets. Then he comes downstairs for a meeting from 11:00am to noon, before retreating back to the residence for another hour and a half, and so on, before typically heading back to the residence for good in the late afternoon.

Donald Trump doesn’t even spend four hours a day in the political wing of the White House. So unless Mike Pence is sitting with Trump watching cable news in the White House bedroom, Pence just got caught telling a rather ridiculous lie. Why would Pence even bother to tell such an oddly specific lie about how much time he spends with Trump? Pence just shifted the focus back to the fact that Trump doesn’t even spend four hours a day doing “president” stuff. Pence rather brazenly just blew it – the only question is whether he blew it on purpose.