Donald Trump takes desperate measures to prevent Mike Pence from looking presidential during Hurricane Irma

| 12:42 pm EDT September 8, 2017
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With hurricanes, fires, and floods bearing down on a number of regions in the United States, it’s left Donald Trump with a few different problems. For one thing, he has no idea how to oversee a disaster response. For another thing, he’s incapable of even pretending to show symbolic leadership, as his two failed visits to Texas demonstrated. But his biggest underlying problem may be Mike Pence – and he’s taking desperate measures to try to sabotage his own VP.

When Hurricane Harvey was first making landfall, Mike Pence tweeted a photo of himself working the phones and looking presidential, but then quickly deleted it. That was a clear sign that Pence was worried about looking too presidential, at least on a platform like Twitter where Donald Trump might see it. Pence did end up taking his own trip to Houston, and while he looked uncomfortable and aloof, he at least looked less unpresidential than Trump did. With Hurricane Irma set to create more havoc, Trump is now blocking Pence from being able to look good in its aftermath.

Trump doesn’t care enough about Irma to stay home at the White House this weekend, as he’s instead headed out for yet another vacation, this time to Camp David. But he did care enough to force his entire cabinet to travel with him to Camp David, so he could hold a cabinet meeting that could just as easily have taken place back the White House on a different day.

Donald Trump’s motivation is rather clear: he wants to make sure Pence can’t be seen meeting with the cabinet in Trump’s absence. One such photo has already surfaced in the media. Trump is not about to let it happen again – even if he has to drag his entire cabinet with him on his vacation. Again, Trump could simply have stayed home to deal with the storm and its aftermath.