Pence was caught off guard during the Asian trip when reporters got close enough to seek his reaction to the resignation of White House aide Rob Porter, who was forced to resign after two former wives said that he had abused them. Some in the White House—not Trump, of course—were admitting the case had been mishandled, and Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, was the focus of criticism because he had known of the allegations for months. When asked about the controversy, he said, “We’ll comment on any issues affecting the White House staff when we get back to Washington.” In response to follow-up questions, Pence added, “You know it’s a great honor for me to serve as vice president.” He continued in this vein until he was able to escape reporters without offering an actual answer.15
The vice president’s performance was so wooden that someone on his staff called for a do-over. Pence soon submitted to an interview in South Korea with Lester Holt of NBC. In this sit-down, he said he hadn’t known about the charges that Porter had abused his two former wives, although the prior investigation of those allegations had blocked Porter’s ability to obtain a permanent security clearance.
As head of the presidential transition team, Pence should have known about allegations of abuse if Porter had been vetted at all or certainly when there was a problem on security clearance. Pence denied it all, just as he had in dealing with prior notice about Michael Flynn or about a security clearance for Flynn’s son. “The time that [Porter] resigned is when I first became aware of the allegations of domestic abuse. And there’s no tolerance in this White House and no place in America for domestic abuse.” This statement raised a larger question about just what was tolerated in the White House, where stories of erratic behavior emerged daily from unnamed inside sources and Trump ranted incessantly about witch hunts and against officials of his government. Pence never addressed such issues.
In South Korea, Pence also faced a lingering problem that had arisen even before his visit to the Olympics when prominent U.S. figure skater Adam Rippon, the first U.S. Olympic skater who openly acknowledged he was gay, criticized him. Rippon said to a reporter for USA Today he would not meet with Pence at the games. “You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy?” he said. “I’m not buying it.” Rippon was referencing Pence’s 2000 campaign literature, which had suggested that the government fund groups offering the discredited practice. “I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren’t a friend of a gay person but that they think that they’re sick,” Rippon said. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to meet somebody like that.”
For Pence, who was doing all he could to avoid embarrassment and controversy, Rippon’s statement presented a conundrum. At first, he tried the Trump method, which involved attacking the press for spreading a story that he claimed was inaccurate. Since both the journalist and Rippon confirmed the report, this did not work. Next, Pence tried to negotiate a meeting with Rippon. This too failed, as Rippon didn’t want to be distracted from the competition. Finally, he used the president’s favorite means of communication—social media—to say to Rippon, “I want you to know we are FOR YOU. Don’t let fake news distract you. I am proud of you and ALL OF OUR GREAT athletes and my only hope for you and all of #TeamUSA is to bring home the gold. Go get ’em!”
Watching from afar, President Trump apparently decided that his team was losing the public relations war and sent his daughter Ivanka to attend the closing ceremonies. Rippon would wear a bronze medal around his neck and go home to appear on national TV shows where he was regarded as an icon of the gay community; the first to compete and win a medal after coming out. Upon his return, Pence would get high marks from his supporters and, having benefited from Ivanka Trump’s last-minute participation, retained the president’s confidence. However, the president would not let Pence forget who was in charge.
In April 2018, Trump acted to curtail Pence’s foreign policy ambitions when the vice president attempted to add Jon Lerner, a longtime aide to Nikki Haley, to serve concurrently as Haley’s and his own national security advisor. A pollster with no national security experience, Lerner, forty-nine, was credited as being a major player in Haley’s gubernatorial career in South Carolina, as he had been for Mark Sanford in his two races for governor in that state. More to the point, Lerner had been one of the so-called Never Trumpers, a group of Republicans who opposed Trump’s election as president on grounds that he was temperamentally unfit for the office he sought. In a rare Sunday night announcement, the White House informed reporters that Lerner had withdrawn his name from consideration. Lerner stayed on as Haley’s aide at the United Nations, apparently acceptable to Trump as long as he stayed away from the White House.
The dustup over Lerner came as the Trump administration waited for the Senate to confirm Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson, who had been fired as secretary of state when Trump decided he was not loyal enough. Pence’s outreach to Lerner suggested he might be seeking a foreign policy alliance with Haley at a moment when Trump was so preoccupied with scandal that foreign affairs policy seemed to be adrift. It also pointed to the possibility that Pence and Haley might be fashioning themselves into a potential dream team to seek the White House should Trump decline to run for reelection in 2020.
Trump had given Pence wide berth in government appointments, and the vice president had established a number of former colleagues and personal choices in the cabinet and throughout the government. However, none had been so tied to the Never Trump cause as Lerner, and the embattled Trump had moved quickly against his addition to the Pence office. Given the president’s tendency toward paranoia—a trait he had embraced in one of his books—he surely wondered if behind his public show of humility, Pence harbored dangerous ambitions.
13
NOT SO HUMBLED
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”
—Mark 15:16
During his first eighteen months in office, Mike Pence developed a certain routine. Missions abroad and to the political hinterlands were balanced by periods of rest at the vice president’s residence. A sprawling Queen Anne–style house constructed in 1893 for the superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, the elegant home was a refuge unapproachable by tourists but still protected by the Secret Service. The agents assigned to the Pences found them generally agreeable, although Mrs. Pence could be quite demanding and didn’t seem to bother with learning their names. She didn’t like the restrictions that came with her husband’s office. When an aide’s wife forgot her identification and was barred from attending a pool party at the observatory, Mrs. Pence let her displeasure be known.
With the exception of the occasional venting of frustrations, both Pences showed a remarkable ability to soldier on, despite Donald Trump’s erratic and emotional behavior. Trump was sensitive to being upstaged and fearful of threats to his own power, but he also needed Mike Pence. It was the vice president who had vouched for Trump with GOP donors and with conservative Christians, and they had been essential to Trump’s election. As the 2018 midterms approached, he needed the vice president’s help in the effort to stave off a Democratic Party surge. A president’s party almost always loses seats in the first election following the president’s assumption of power. Things looked even worse for Trump as his approval ratings hovered near historic lows and scores of Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, declared they wouldn’t run for reelection. Worse still, if the Democrats took control of either the House or the Senate, they could launch investigations of Trump that could paralyze his presidency and might even force him out of office.
Pence was such an effective surrogate for Trump that he was dispatched on a dizzying schedule of events where he would speak on the president’s behalf and raise money for the Republican Party and its candidates. Along the way, he promoted his own deeply conservative social agenda, which was colored with much
more religious conviction than Trump ever showed. In speech after speech, Pence said that he and like-minded people were under assault and that Donald Trump, no matter what else he said or did, was a reliable ally.
“From the very first day of this administration, President Trump has been keeping his word to stand without apology for the sanctity of human life,” Pence said in Nashville at a meeting of the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List and Life Issues Institute. He hailed cuts to funding for the UN Population Fund, which promoted contraception, and new scrutiny of Planned Parenthood, which provided abortions and contraception. And he warned that such measures were always in danger as long as Democrats and Democratic-appointed judges were around.
“The truth is that the opposition is always looking for ways to undo our achievements, and notably in the category of the progress that we’ve made in the cause of life,” Pence said that day in Nashville. The goal was no less than overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal. “I truly do believe, if all of us do all that we can, that we will once again, in our time, restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.” With Republicans in office, Pence also reminded wavering voters that more judges in the mold of Neil Gorsuch, who has been described as one of the most right-wing Supreme Court justices in U.S. history, would be appointed to the federal bench. (Gorsuch was able to join the court because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had blocked Merrick Garland, President Obama’s choice to replace Antonin Scalia in 2016.) “This president has been busy appointing strict constructionists to our federal courts at every level,” Pence said. “These are men and women that will uphold the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.”
The rhetoric was the same wherever the vice president went, even if he did vary his greeting. In Ohio, he saluted the Buckeyes. On February 2, 2018, in a visit to Pittsburgh, he declared, “It is great to be back in the Keystone State!” His visit there was part of the all-out effort to push Rick Saccone over the top in a special election for Congress. “I want you to go tell your friends and neighbors why this election matters,” Pence said, tying his opponent Conor Lamb to Democrats, who they wanted to paint as out of touch with the Republican version of the common man.
“I believe with all of my heart that all the media in the world, all the advertising, all the commercials, all the mail pieces that might fill up your mailbox are not to be compared to the power and the impact that you can have with someone who knows you and respects you. The conversation across a backyard fence, the grocery store, outside your place of worship, nothing is more powerful than friends talking to friends, neighbors talking to neighbors. I want you to go tell your neighbors and friends why this election matters. It matters not just for this district and not just for this great state but the opportunity we have in this election to elect someone to Washington, D.C., who’s going to stand with President Donald Trump and keep America growing.”
Pence was a master of homespun style who always seemed like he was addressing a friendly, if fictitious, America of the past where divorce was shocking, doors were never locked, and everyone prayed together on Sundays. In western Pennsylvania, Pence was joined by a troupe of Trump’s current real-life version of The Apprentice cast—Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Kellyanne Conway—who were desperate to see Saccone elected as a sign of the president’s strength. Trump himself visited twice—and Republican supporters spent an estimated $10 million in the effort.
In the end, all the effort wasn’t enough. In a district where Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton by twenty points, newcomer Democrat Conor Lamb eked out the victory by just six hundred votes. Pence nevertheless gained from the experience and continued traveling the country, trying to evoke an America that is a series of local tribes—like the Hoosiers, who in his distorted view have special qualities and care for their fellow Hoosiers like no one else. This ultimately fed a divisive narrative of Us and Them that easily translated to politics: Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi (the prime Republican target of 2018), and the liberals are not like Us.
In politically vital New Hampshire, on March 22, 2018, Pence declared in Manchester, “It is great to be back in the Granite State”—applause—“being able to join all of you hardworking men and women.… And it’s my great privilege today to bring warm greetings from a man that New Hampshire put on the path to the White House, a man who three months ago today signed historic tax cuts to put America first. I bring greetings from President Donald Trump, a great friend of New Hampshire.”
Pence went on to repeat “Granite State” six more times before finishing his pitch and departing for Atlanta, where it was “great to be back in the Peach State. I bring greetings from the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.”
Each time, in a speech that took him a half hour to deliver, Pence pressed on local issues; coal in Pennsylvania, jobs in New Hampshire. Where he couldn’t identify a local issue to stress, Pence praised the president and the Grand Old Party. He was an effective salesman speaking in the style of the midwestern radio host he had once been. Despite the caution of Charles Dickens, who wrote that humility is a quality best identified by the beholder, Pence repeatedly said he was a humble man who by the grace of God had made it further than he could have imagined. He had gotten this far, however, through a blend of methodical self-promotion, the investment of millions of dollars provided by his right-wing supporters, and luck. Pence, like Dickens’s Uriah Heep, protestations of humility to the contrary, “aspired” deeply.
While saying he was humbled at every turn, Pence also praised a number of mentors before whom his humility was even greater. Pence said Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing radio bigot, was his mentor on the airwaves, though he warned that he was only a decaffeinated version of the boisterous opioid abuser; Dick Armey was another, the fellow Tea Party member who served for a while as House majority leader while Pence was in Congress; Charles Colson, White House counsel under Richard Nixon and Watergate felon who found God while serving time in prison; James Dobson, the gay-bashing evangelical Trump supporter who founded the right-wing Christian organization Focus on the Family; Paul Weyrich, another right-wing commentator closely connected to dominionism—governance under Christian biblical law; and Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, which rejected U.S. standards for affirmative action and who once publicly referred to minorities as “dark ones.”
Pence’s aspirations were supported by two secretive, intermingled political action committees, America First Policies and the Great America Committee. America First Policies was created to boost the reelection of Trump, and was formed one week after the inauguration. The staff included Brad Parscale, whom Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had brought into the Trump orbit in 2016. Parscale had worked closely with the data mining efforts of Cambridge Analytica, which had used eighty-five million pilfered Facebook profiles to aid Trump’s social media effort. Founded by top Trump advisor Steve Bannon and bankrolled by billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica was being investigated by British authorities for links with Russian military intelligence. America First Policies was cofounded by Rick Gates, the former assistant to Trump’s second presidential campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Both men were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in his Russia probe. Gates pled guilty to two counts—lying to investigators and for conspiracy against the United States—and began to cooperate in Mueller’s probe.
From the beginning of the Russia controversy, the vice president’s team tried to separate him from it, telling anyone who would listen that the only ones who might have had contact with the foreign operatives were denizens of Trump Tower in New York. When it became clear that Mueller could make trouble for Trump, the vice president formed his own political action committee—Great America Committee—and began raising money and employing operatives, including former Trump campaign chief Corey Lewandowski and Nick Ayers. Lewandowski had become notorious for physically bullying a
female reporter during the 2016 campaign. Ayers had been chairman of the Pence for Vice President campaign. Time magazine had recognized him as one of the most powerful young people in politics. He had been a key consultant to the 2016 election campaign of Missouri governor Eric Greitens, the former Navy SEAL who was indicted in February 2018 on a felony charge stemming from allegations of sexual misconduct and invasion of privacy. Greitens resigned as governor on June 1, 2018.
Although America First Policies was devoted to Trump’s reelection in 2020, its structure and message—lower taxes, border security, and the fight against abortion rights—would work just as well for Pence, come what may. Behind Pence’s greetings from the president to every crowd brought together in the Americas First Policies traveling road show, Pence was working to enhance his own political brand. Quiet and patient, Pence would do everything he could to fulfill God’s plan, perhaps even including the presidency. He would be helped by the longtime allies sprinkled across the administration and installed in political action committees. And he could count on a well-funded and growing Christian nationalist movement.
Dedicated to the pursuit of power under the rubric of religious freedom, the Christian nationalists backed candidates for local, state, and national office and pushed legislation like Pence’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would enable discrimination. This movement was led by organizers who made no secret of their aims. David Barton of the group WallBuilders openly promoted the idea that America is a country that should be controlled by conservative Christians for their benefit. A ministry called Integrity Leadership, founded by an evangelist called Buddy Pilgrim, advertised that Christian “dominion in earthly realms of authority (business & politics) is a biblical mandate.” A third group, United in Purpose, founded by convicted embezzler Bill Dallas, was devoted to using social media data to deliver votes for candidates like Mike Pence. Looking forward, the vice president could count on Dallas, Pilgrim, Barton, and many others to augment the usual Republican machinery with everything from money to motivated volunteers who would approach politics as a crusade.
The Shadow President Page 30