The Shadow President

by Michael D'Antonio

  In the meantime, however, Pence was attracting attention as an emblem of intolerance. In early 2018, in his hometown of Columbus, a high school senior named Erin Bailey organized the city’s first-ever gay pride festival. Initially planned to occupy just one block in the center of the city, the venue was expanded to accommodate triple the number of vendors than were expected. Although the weather was cloudy and cool, attendance exceeded two thousand as drag performers were cheered by enthusiastic crowds and rainbow flags were draped like capes over young shoulders. One city official told The Indianapolis Star, “This is what we do: We welcome everyone to Columbus.”1

  EPILOGUE

  THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT

  And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves.

  —Luke 21:25

  Mike Pence and his supporters and aides took as an article of faith that the glorious day would come: eventually he would be president of the United States. Pence, a man of supreme faith, never expressed doubt about this destiny. However, others might say that Pence’s ascension to the presidency would be the culmination of a perfect storm of improbable events. Who could imagine that a failing governor chosen as the running mate of Donald J. Trump, a man whose candidacy was improbable to the point of mockery, would eventually assume the presidency? In fact, tens of millions could envision such a turn of history, and they had voted for the Trump-Pence ticket in hopes that it would arrive.

  In many ways, said former Indiana senator Richard Lugar, Pence’s role may have enhanced the survival of the Trump presidency. Certainly, said Lugar, Pence’s “loyalty to the president may lead him to make many statements that are dubious.” But that was not necessarily a problem.

  Members of the religious Right don’t “necessarily forgive the president or absolve him for whatever his deeds may be that are really counter to the good religious spirit,” said Lugar. “Mike Pence makes up for it. So, the combination of the two makes the president in a stronger situation, even given the criticism of his personal conduct.”

  Sooner or later, Pence’s evangelical supporters—along with Never Trumpers and Republican-or-bust believers—would say that everything justified the wait. The troublesome Donald J. Trump, that imperfect vessel, had been a means to an end. The investigations into the Russia scandal and other matters, which produced indictments and guilty pleas of Trump allies, could provoke Trump’s resignation or even impeachment. If, somehow, Donald Trump survived his first term and were reelected, Pence could wait. He was a young man with patience, the patience of Job.

  Whenever the blessed day came, Pence would stand at the ceremony he once predicted for the interns in his congressional office. He would again swear “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.… so help me God.” In his presidential inaugural speech, there would be no bleak talk of wastelands and suffering. He would say as he always did that he was humbled, very humbled, and beyond that, he would give thanks for God’s providence.

  For most of his life Pence had believed he was guided by God’s plan. He believed that the Lord intended for him to halt the erosion of religious conviction in the United States. And though he avoided stating it himself, many of his evangelical friends believed Pence’s ultimate purpose was to establish a a government based on biblical law. This was what they called Christian Dominionism.

  Pence’s election to the presidency would cap a remarkable turnaround. He and the religious Right had long seen themselves as victims in a culture war. This is what Pence meant when he said, “Despite the fact that we live in a time when traditional values and even religious convictions are increasingly marginalized by a secular popular culture—a time when it’s become acceptable, even fashionable, to malign religious belief—in this time, I believe with all my heart that faith in America is rising, as well.” In context, America had been under attack by the forces of nonbelievers. A Pence presidency would repel those attacks.

  At the top of Pence’s concerns was the destruction of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Pence and the religious Right were one or at most two Supreme Court appointments away from that hallmark victory. “For all the progress since 1973,” Pence said, referring to the year of the Roe v. Wade decision, “I just know in my heart of hearts that this will be the generation that restores life in America.” Looking at the justices of the court, the actuarial tables were in his favor. The two key members under watch were both octogenarians—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a solid Democratic progressive, and Anthony Kennedy, the middle-of-the-road Republican swing vote. When Kennedy resigned suddenly as of July 2018, Pence’s office ran the search for a new justice and the vice president interviewed the candidates. Trump was pledged to choose a conservative ready to overturn Roe and push for a hard right turn on the court.

  The transition of power from the Trump administration to the presidency of Mike Pence would be a streamlined affair because Pence had seeded his own people throughout the executive branch. Their purpose would be to fulfill the libertarian dreams of those who funded the rise of Mike Pence from his early days in Indiana politics. High on their agenda would be tax cuts, slashed business regulations, the decimation of environmental protections and exploitation of the natural resources—oil, gas, minerals, timber, et cetera—on public lands. Although the Kochs and others would cringe at the idea of restrictions on personal freedoms, they would accept some of the Christian Right’s moral regulation if they got the economic policies they wanted. As long as Pence followed the agenda they had trained him to pursue he could have his holy empire on the hill.

  Pence would have no problem reconciling the two elements of his base—religious zealots and tax-cutting, anti-government minimalists. His greater problem would be to govern a nation that rejected much of his agenda. Polls showed that most Americans supported abortion rights, preferred environmental regulation, favored preserving Social Security and Medicare, and liked many of the parts of the health care system that the government controlled. Pence’s old friend in Congress, lame-duck House Speaker Paul Ryan, had failed in his efforts to destroy Obamacare and privatize Social Security. Would Pence have any more success?

  Much as he yearned to act, the Pence presidential dream and agenda would have to wait because, as of summer 2018, his presidency had not arrived. It was not, however, a truly remote fantasy. As the Christian Right’s favorite son, Pence had made the difference in the 2016 election. Millions had voted for the Republicans, believing that God was sending a signal as He put Pence on the ticket. Pence’s presence had also reassured GOP donors, including the Koch brothers, who had been reluctant to rally behind the erratic Trump. Pence had also brought to Trump a vast network of Christian Right political activists who had been pulling the party in their direction for decades and were more than ready to assume key positions. The Trump administration was filled with Pence people because, bluntly speaking, Trump didn’t have any people of his own. With high places occupied by his friends, Pence had thus functioned for years as a kind of shadow president, making the machinery work as Trump was consumed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of his 2016 campaign ties to foreign interests and various crimes detected in the probe.

  The chaos that was Trump’s hallmark had been a challenge for Pence from the moment he joined the campaign. In this case he had been forced to contort his words to make it seem that he was essential to the team, but unaware of Don Jr.’s meetings with the Russians, of Manafort’s unsavory business with the Ukraine, of Flynn’s Turkish engagement and bluster, of Erik Prince’s long support for Pence and Prince’s connection to the Russian scandal. Had Pence survived the Russia affair? Would the public overlook it—and would the media forget? And there was always the double trouble of pardons—for a former president and his men. After the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, Gerald Ford had declared “our long national nightmare is over”; the pardoning of Nixon did not play well—
Ford lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat and an evangelical.

  Amid the turmoil, Pence would continue to declare that faith in the United States was on the rise. It was a play on words—faith, he meant to say, the practice and declaration of religion at the center of American life, was at the heart of Pence’s political career and his arrival at the White House. But he also spoke of faith as trust in America. Where did that reside? Throughout a trajectory that took him from Congress to the governorship of Indiana and to the White House, Pence was taken with suspicion, even by fellow Republicans and non–politically minded evangelicals. Many were disappointed with his appeasement of all Trumpian designs—sex scandals, lies almost beyond counting, money laundering, and brutishness. Pence had done nothing. His team would labor to reconstruct a narrative in which he would be the sober, moderate leader a president is expected to be. There were doubts.

  When Trump flouted the separation of powers, called Mueller’s investigation a witch hunt, and used shameless surrogates in Congress to attack the justice system, Pence assented with his silence. Asked about the porn star Stormy Daniels and the $130,000 payment she received from Trump’s lawyer weeks before the election, Pence said it was a “private matter” and he knew nothing about it. When an aide expressed concern about how far one could go to cover Trump’s deceptions, he had the impression that Pence’s focus was on doing anything he could to support the president.

  The vice president’s view, that the ends justify the means, confused close advisors who considered themselves to be the kind of Christians who were honest and truthful. They were troubled when, for example, Pence ignored the scripture that commands “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born,” in order to support Trump’s attacks on immigrants. But since the Bible is a self-contradicting text, Pence could select competing passages to defend himself. In extreme circumstances, Christians are permitted so-called righteous lies. And since his brand of Christianity made each believer his or her own authority, Pence was free to practice self-justification ad nauseum. Conveniently, his righteous lies also secured his place in Trump’s universe, in which, as White House factotum Kellyanne Conway explained, distortions are merely “alternative facts.” With alternative facts and righteous lies, it was easy to justify loyalty to a president who repeatedly attacked the notion of shared reality in order to divide the country into patriotic supporters and traitorous enemies. As Trump would eventually explain, in reference to politics, “everybody plays games.”1

  * * *

  No one in American politics would have been better suited to the task of serving Trump (especially his ego) while protecting himself than Pence. Reflexively obsequious to the point of self-abasement, Pence seemed to enjoy praising the president in public settings and, when he didn’t speak, beaming with admiration when in the top man’s presence. However, Pence also had a preternatural ability to absent himself in key moments of peril.

  Pence had also devoted himself to retail politicking, crisscrossing the country on behalf of fellow Republicans. In the process, he quietly accumulated political chits and filled the coffers of his own political action committee. Then, in 2018, as Trump attacked judicial officials who investigated him and suffered one scandal after another, Pence moved out of his shadow. First in Israel and then in South Korea, he appeared to be acting as a kind of replacement president, giving speeches and lending his presence to landmark events.

  Remarkably, the many crises created by Trump, from staff turmoil in the executive branch to scandals involving mistreating women, played to Pence’s advantage. Trump’s failures were the failures of an immoral man whose sexual infidelities, lies, and distortions had marked him as a sinner. The contrasting public personas, as Pence raised his profile, couldn’t have been starker. This was especially true when it came to religion and politics. At various points in his life, Trump had been a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican. His Christianity had been of a pasted-on type, fixed to his candidacy like wallpaper and just as thin. Throughout his life, Trump had been the most boorish and least subtle man in every room. A lifelong conservative, Republican Pence had been the politest person in every setting, and his approach was always careful and guarded. When added to his frequent evocations of God, his policy stands confirmed his status as the leading voice of political Christianity.2

  * * *

  In May 2018 Pence delivered a commencement address at conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan. He used the occasion to proclaim “a new era of opportunity and optimism” for Christian Right believers. He credited “President Trump and our entire administration” with “advancing the very principles that you learned here in the halls at Hillsdale College—the principles that have always been the source of America’s greatness and strength.”

  Pence’s decision to appear at Hillsdale was, in itself, a signal to his political base. The alma mater of his allies Erik Prince and Betsy DeVos, Hillsdale was a Christian school that famously had opted out of all forms of federal aid, including programs that underwrite loans, rather than submit to regulations. This decision was announced by the school’s trustees, who said they would, “with the help of God, resist, by all legal means, any encroachments on its independence.”

  In 2013, Larry Arnn, the president of the college, sparked a controversy when he complained that after he took office in 2000, federal authorities suggested the school did not have, as he termed it, enough “dark ones” in its student body. The university apologized for the remarks of the president, who had, himself, taken office in a moment of intense scandal. His predecessor, George Roche III, had resigned after his daughter-in-law announced she had had a nineteen-year affair with him and then committed suicide. In his letter of resignation, Roche said, “We have proved that integrity, values and courage can still triumph in a corrupt world. Hillsdale College is a monument to those beliefs.”

  Although some in the university community considered him, as one professor put it, “a phony and a fraud,” Roche’s legacy would include a huge endowment and Hillsdale’s place, in the Christian Right subculture, as a citadel of belief and animosity toward government. It was, in short, the ideal setting for a Mike Pence speech.3

  * * *

  An amalgam of Christian Right fearfulness about social change and casual misstatement of fact, Pence’s Hillsdale address offered few accurate assessments of American life. His most glaring misrepresentation was the centerpiece claim that faith is on the rise. In fact, as measured by church attendance and religious affiliation, it had been in decline since Pence entered Congress in 2001. At the same time, the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation had almost doubled.4 Though Pence’s loyalty to facts was not much stronger than Donald Trump’s, his manner and his tendency to avoid the spotlight meant that he generally got away with his various distortions. At the same time, Pence’s team, even those who came to him from within Trump’s orbit, was so much less dysfunctional and more disciplined that it seemed capable of performing the normal functions of government. On the political side, he could count on two former Trump operatives, Brad Parscale and Corey Lewandowski, to maintain his legitimacy with the most extreme elements of the base without alienating too many moderates.

  For the most part, the various advisors and Pence himself had managed to keep him clear of the scandals that rocked their White House. It was not always possible. More than once, Pence and his staff came up with public excuses that kept the vice president at a distance from the controversy, as if everyone else had been aware but protecting him from knowing the obvious. Frequently, though, he was caught in a plausible-denial trap when Trump made some off-the-cuff remark that showed him saying the opposite. And there were people close to him, Lewandowski, Parscale, and Prince among them, who might be drawn into the Mueller investigation at any time. Not since he paid for the congressional campaign ad featuring a shadowy oil “sheik” had Pence been so close to a problem involving men in traditional garb from the Pe
rsian Gulf region.

  In the middle of the maelstrom, Pence stayed focused on the agendas set by the two camps of his political base—and never expressed any concern about reconciling them. Whenever possible, Pence preferred to avoid conflict and surprises. He was so wary of journalists that as vice president he almost never submitted to extended interviews, even with the hyperpartisan, conservative Fox News. Instead, with the pleasant demeanor of a neighbor speaking over a backyard fence, an image he sometimes employed, Pence used staged events to communicate his humility and agreeableness.

  This approach might have worked superficially, reassuring casual observers, but those who knew Pence remained alarmed by his unblinking loyalty to Trump. Indeed, as time passed, the president showed himself to be consistently callous and cruel in ways Pence had never been. This prompted obvious questions. How could a person of good character do nothing as Trump sowed conspiracy theories and divided the country? Were he alive, Pence’s role model Ronald Reagan would ask this question. In fact, in June 2018, Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis said that her father would be “appalled and heartbroken” by Trump and “horrified at where we’ve come to.”5

  * * *

  In foreign affairs, Pence tried hard to mirror Trump but it was often a struggle because the president was so mercurial. Trump’s engagement with the regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea was a case in point. Although Trump sought a summit in order to deal with Kim’s growing nuclear weapons capability, he also insulted him routinely. When national security advisor John Bolton mused about Kim going the way of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was eventually killed after giving up his nuclear ambition, Pence chimed in with support for the comparison. An influential but junior official in the North Korean foreign ministry responded by calling Pence “a political dummy.”