Mike Pence deletes tweet about Hurricane Harvey

| 8:58 pm EDT August 30, 2017
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During the course of the Hurricane Harvey crisis, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a photo of himself working the phones along with a description of the various officials he was coordinating with. Given the circumstances, it seemed like a fully appropriate and reassuring message. But then Pence mysteriously deleted the tweet, raising eyebrows as to what may have been going on behind the scenes.

Here’s an image of Mike Pence’s deleted tweet, as captured and posted by ABC News reporter Meredith McGraw:

In the tweet, Pence is referring to the two Senators from Texas and the two Senators from Louisiana, the states which have seen the brunt of the post-hurricane flooding. Pence even gave a shout out to “POTUS” Donald Trump to cover his bases. But he then apparently decided it wasn’t enough to cover his bases.

We know that Mike Pence didn’t delete this tweet simply because he changed his mind about the wording or phrasing, as he never did replace it with anything similar. Instead the only logical conclusion for why Pence deleted this was that he must have felt it looked a bit too presidential. There he was in that photo, sitting at a desk, looking authoritative, working the phones, making arrangements for disaster relief, and doing all the things that Donald Trump should have been doing. Best anyone can tell, Trump spent that time posting angry tweets about Mexico and Claire McCaskill instead.

Mike Pence is well aware that while Donald Trump is largely cut off from real news and the real world, he does still spend plenty of time on Twitter. In fact Trump has been known to retweet Pence from time to time, so Pence knows that Trump is reading his every tweet. With Trump’s presidency hanging on by a thread, and Pence potentially set to inherit it, Pence must have decided he didn’t want Trump to see him looking too presidential in that tweet. There is no other logical explanation for why he would have deleted a tweet that made himself look good.