After the summit was convened, Pence caused problems when he seemed to contradict Trump’s promise to cease military exercises with South Korea. Senate Republicans reported he had told them that at least “some exercises … will continue.” Pence’s spokesman, Jarrod Agen, quickly issued a corrective on Twitter that further muddied the story. “The Vice President did NOT say that military exercises will continue with South Korea.” The denial didn’t work. A Colorado Republican senator, Cory Gardner, said he knew what he had heard: “VP was very clear: regular readiness training and training exchanges will continue [and] went on to say while this readiness training and exchanges will occur, war games will not.”6
In the end Pence might have been jumping ahead of White House guidance by telling the truth. In late June, South Korea and the United States did call off scheduled military exercises, as a result of the Kim-Trump summit.
The apparent North Korea misstep came after Trump and Pence had so alienated the world community, including traditional partners like Canada and France, that only Israel, governed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, could be counted as an ever-loyal ally. Pence played a role in this process, abandoning the Koch brothers and his other free-trade friends to back Trump’s “America first” isolationism, which included imposing tariffs on many trading partners. In Europe, diplomats feared the end of an American-led alliance that had lasted since World War II. In Asia, an emboldened China no longer faced a powerful U.S. check on its ambition to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, joked darkly about the fact at a meeting in 2017 in Washington at which she barely hid her disdain for Donald Trump. In a decade, she said, the fund’s annual meetings “might be held in Chinese at its revamped headquarters—in Beijing. If one used dream binoculars,” Lagarde said, “we might not be sitting in Washington, D.C. We’ll do it in our Beijing head office.”7
The threats of trade wars and the apparent decline in America’s global leadership seemed to have no effect on the support Christian evangelicals showed for Trump and Pence. These voters were intently focused on domestic affairs, cultural issues, and spreading the Gospel. They believed their agenda was being fulfilled. This is what Mike Pence meant when he said, often, that “faith in America is rising again” and, as a consequence, the country was on the rise.
The rising would be accompanied by an aggressive government campaign against sinners both at home and abroad. This was the mission advocated by Rev. Ralph Drollinger, the leader of the Trump cabinet’s weekly prayer meetings, which Mike Pence attended with regularity. Drollinger, who imagines himself to be a prophet, became a trusted advisor to Trump when, in 2016, he urged him to establish a “benevolent dictatorship.” Since then, the prophet said, “Of all the Bible studies I’ve written on policy, Trump’s enacting everything I’ve written.”8
As Drollinger explained to a German newspaper in 2017, the U.S. government’s “God-given responsibility” and “primary calling is to moralize a fallen world through the use of force.” At home, this calling suggests a religious police state worthy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Abroad, said Drollinger, this vision would find America “bearing the sword” as an “avenger who brings on wrath” upon anyone who “practices evil.” Islam is a particular problem in Drollinger’s view because, he believes, it “has historically spread through the sword and seeks nothing less than world conquest for Allah.” Should the United States confront Islam militarily, Drollinger said, “leadership should never enter into it with ‘Low Testosterone.’ It is an all or nothing commitment of the totality of the nation in its decisive quest for all out victory as quickly as possible!”9
In addition to Pence, Drollinger’s prayer sessions, which sometimes occurred at the White House, were often attended by Mike Pompeo, who was Trump’s first director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then served as secretary of state. In 2015, Pompeo publicly embraced Drollinger as a fellow believer and echoed his talk about America facing off against the evil in the world. Quoting from Pence’s favorite book of the Bible, Jeremiah, he said, “Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all, so they will fall among the fallen, they will be brought down when they are punished.”10
If Pence wanted to appoint new members of the court, he would have to survive any scandal that affected the Trump administration. He would also have to continue to manage his own image. For the modestly informed, he offered a mild exterior that made it hard to believe he would outlaw all abortions, which was something a majority opposed. Libertarians simply chose to ignore the abortion issue because they liked what Pence said about cutting taxes and government funding for almost everything other than defense spending. So it was that Pence could represent, simultaneously, the symbols of the cross and the dollar sign.
In campaigns, on the radio, in Congress, and in the White House, Pence carried the two emblems of his beliefs while walking a political tightrope. The traits that permitted him to do this had been noticed long ago by the Club for Growth and other big-money backers. Chief among them was Pence’s ability to present himself as a pleasant, even harmless person worthy of the public trust. As a legislator, he had done so little that the public could see that this image was rarely disturbed. As governor, he revealed more of his true self, but since he was isolated in a midwestern state that rarely received much notice from the national press, few outside of Indiana were aware of his missteps and failures. Returning to Washington as Donald Trump’s second, he was once again able to act behind the scenes, barely revealing himself even though he had created a shadow administration as loyal to him as it was to the president.
For the most part Pence managed to keep his balance. An exception arose in June 2018, when he addressed the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas. The largest conservative Christian denomination in the country, the SBC’s members were generally aligned with the Trump/Pence administration, but their faith retained its historic resistance to abject politicking. Pence irritated many when he addressed the gathering as if it were a campaign rally crowd. After listing what he regarded as the Trump team’s many accomplishments, Pence said, “With Donald Trump in the White House and God’s help, we will make America safe again, we will make America prosperous again, and to borrow a phrase, we will make America great again.” In response, an editor for Christianity Today took to social media to say, “I seem to remember other politicians (I’m thinking folks like Huckabee, or even Obama) get more into sermonizing/messaging, or reflecting on their own faith?” Newly elected convention president J. D. Greear said, “Commissioned missionaries, not political platforms, are what we do.”11
One of the youngest people ever elected SBC president, Greear represented a strand of evangelicalism that appealed to those less devoted to conservative politics. In these circles, the Trump/Pence administration’s resistance to climate science and harsh treatment of immigrants struck sour notes and Pence’s convention speech could be seen as a step too far.
Besides creating a humanitarian tragedy, Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy on the border was a major public relations miscue. The heartrending images and sounds of babies and toddlers separated from their parents provoked outrage at home and around the world. Pence, the descendant of immigrants who fled violence and economic hardship in Europe a century earlier, stood by the president and said nothing about the crisis that Trump had provoked. Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough used his MSNBC program Morning Joe to ask: “How does Mike Pence, how [does] Karen Pence, how do any of these people continue being associated with a man who is now openly bigoted against everybody who is not white and rich?” Scarborough’s guest, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, added, “Mike Pence stands there and he puts on a frown and he nods sagely at the most sort of racist vile comments and sentiments coming out of the mouth of the president that he serves so loyally and unquestioni
ngly. I certainly hope people remember. This should leave an indelible stain on Mike Pence and his career and on the others around him.”
On the day after the Pence address in Dallas, even a formerly fervent Trump supporter, Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, called the administration’s practice of separating parents and children at the border “disgraceful.”12 Many evangelicals were, as was Graham, outraged by images of children placed in cages for safekeeping and reports of a nursing baby being wrested from a mother’s arms. On the day Pence’s remarks were reported, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, was blunt: “Separating babies from their mothers is not the answer and is immoral.”
One former staff member saw the immigration story as a litmus test for Pence as a moral leader. He was alarmed when his former boss did not react to a brutish comment by Corey Lewandowski. Appearing on Fox News, Lewandowski mocked a commentator who spoke about a ten-year-old girl with Down syndrome who had been wrenched from her migrant mother in south Texas. “Womp, womp,” intoned Lewandowski, as if to say too bad, who cares. Lewandowski, fired from Trump’s campaign in 2016 after he knocked a woman reporter to the ground, had recently joined Pence’s political action committee.
“Whether or not Pence boots Lewandowski from his super PAC advisory board—or whatever his role is—will say a lot about whether Pence is totally hitching his wagon to Trump or whether he’s going to start distancing himself,” said the staffer, who himself left precisely because of such concerns. “This ‘womp-womp’ comment should be more than enough to doom Corey (under normal circumstances).” Pence kept Lewandowski on as part of his team.
For Pence, who had previously called for immigrants to be treated with compassion, lockstep agreement with all of Trump’s policies brought him close to being called a hypocrite. Columnist George Will, a conscience of American conservatism, called Pence “a sycophantic poodle.” However, from Pence’s point of view, if he were to be president one day, he needed the visibility that came with serving as Trump’s surrogate—no matter what. Although Donald Trump was regarded as a political neophyte when he ran for president, thanks to his TV shows and a lifelong quest for media attention, he was vastly better known than Mike Pence. More important, little separated the real Donald Trump from the bragging, boorish, and divisive figure seen at rallies and debates. Trump was who he said he was. This was not the case with Pence, whose pious and cautious exterior hid a desire for power equal to Trump’s. The main difference was that Pence was truly committed to the authoritarian style of religion Trump had seemed to profess for the purpose of gaining election. With it, he intended to do far more to change the nation and the world than Trump could imagine.
NOTES
*Please note some of the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.
1: The Sycophant
1. For Pence’s explanation of his identity, see “Mike Pence: I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order,” Week, July 20, 2016. For Obama quote, see his remarks on Donald Trump’s election, Washington Post, November 9, 2016.
2. Pence remarks from his speech at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in 2010.
3. For Pence and Trump, see McKay Coppins, “God’s Plan for Mike Pence,” The Atlantic, January 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/gods-plan-for-mike-pence/546569/.
4. For Pence’s response to Mueller’s appointment see Rebecca Ruiz, “Pence Hires Criminal Defense Lawyer to Aid Him in Investigations,” The New York Times, June 15, 2017.
5. For cabinet members’ remarks, see White House, “Remarks by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Members of the Cabinet,” December 20, 2017, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-donald-trump-vice-president-mike-pence-members-cabinet/.
6. Matt Lewis, “My Theory on Why Mike Pence Kisses Donald Trump’s, Uh, Ring So Fulsomely,” Daily Beast, December 12, 2017, www.thedailybeast.com/my-theory-on-why-mike-pence-kisses-donald-trumps-uh-ring-so-fulsomely.
7. For Pence and the culture war, see Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Exiled: Mike Pence and the Evangelical Fantasy of Persecution,” Harper’s, May 2018, and Damian Sharkov, “Steve Bannon Wanted Culture War to Change U.S. Politics, Says Whistleblower,” Newsweek, May 17, 2018.
8. For Calvinism, see Michael Massing, Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), i-xi.
9. For American Christians as equivalent of ancient Jews, see O’Gieblyn, “Exiled.”
10. Coppins, “God’s Plan.”
11. For Pruitt record, see Alexander C. Kaufman, “Scott Pruitt Twice Introduced Anti-Abortion Bills Giving Men ‘Property Rights’ Over Fetuses,” Huffington Post, May 24, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-abortion_us_5b06ce55e4b05f0fc845a4aa; Brady Dennis, “Scott Pruitt, Longtime Adversary of EPA, Confirmed to Lead the Agency,” Washington Post, February 17, 2017; Niina Heikkinen, “Scott Pruitt, Christ Follower,” E&E News Climatewire, Friday, July 14, 2017, www.eenews.net/climatewire/2017/07/14/stories/1060057367; Evan Halper, “He Once Said Mothers Do Not Belong in State Office. Now He Leads the Trump Cabinet in Bible Study,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2017, www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-la-pol-trump-cabinet-pastor-20170803-story.html.
12. Dana Milbank, “This Week Proved God Exists, and He Has a Wicked Sense of Humor,” Washington Post, May 4, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-says-president-trump-doesnt-have-a-prayer/2018/05/04/013eafc6-4fd4-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?utm_term=.ab84b6b8712e.
13. For DeVos quote, see Valerie Strauss, “She’s a Billionaire Who Said Schools Need Guns to Fight Bears. Here’s What You May Not Know About Betsy DeVos,” Washington Post, February 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/02/07/shes-a-billionaire-who-said-schools-need-guns-to-fight-bears-heres-what-you-may-not-know-about-betsy-devos/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.33c4729881da.
14. For Koch’s organizations, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 56.
15. For training of politicians and their talents, see Jonathan Rausch and Raymond LaRaja, “Re-Engineering Politicians,” Brookings Institution, December 7, 2017, www.brookings.edu/research/re-engineering-politicians-how-activist-groups-choose-our-politicians-long-before-we-vote/.
16. For Pence ideology, see Michael Barbaro and Monica Davey, “Mike Pence: A Conservative Proudly Out of Sync With His Times,” New York Times, July 15, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/us/politics/mike-pence-history.html.
17. For Christian supremacy, see Jeremy Scahill, “Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History,” Intercept, November 15, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/mike-pence-will-be-the-most-powerful-christian-supremacist-in-us-history/.
18. For status threat, see Diana Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (April 2018), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115.
19. For Pence and Arpaio, see Sarah Quinlan, “Vice President Pence Calling Joe Arpaio a ‘Tireless Champion’ of ‘Rule of Law’ Ignores Arpaio’s Record,” RedState, May 1, 2018, www.redstate.com/sarahquinlan/2018/05/01/vice-president-pence-calling-joe-arpaio-a-tireless-champion-of-rule-of-law-ignores-arpaios-record/; Stephen Lemons, “Joe Arpaio: Tent City a ‘Concentration Camp,’” Phoenix New Times, August 2, 2010, www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/joe-arpaio-tent-city-a-concentration-camp-6500984.
2: Model Citizen
1. For “Animal House,” see Chris Miller, The Real Animal House: The Awesomely Depraved Saga of the Fraternity That Inspired the Movie (New York: Little, Brown, 2006); and McKay Coppins, “God’s Plan for Mike Pence,” The Atlantic, January 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/gods-plan-for-mike-pence/546569/.
2. For Pence’s legislative record, see “Before Mike Pence was Donald Trump’s Running Mate, He Served in Congress for 12 years,” Govtrack.us, July 18, 2016,
https://govtrackinsider.com/before-mike-pence-was-donald-trumps-running-mate-he-served-in-congress-for-12-years-72b511b95d9.
3. For the German side of the family, see “Descendants of Michael Pence (1738–1799),” Neal’s Genealogy Page, May 2016, http://nealsgenealogy.awardspace.info/pence.htm.
4. For the Irish side of Pence’s family, see Michael Farry, Sligo 1914–1921: A Chronicle of Conflict (Trim, Ireland: Killoran Press, 1992); John P. Brennan, Bureau of Military History, witness statement, https://wheresmerrill.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/1918-tubbercurry-volunteers.pdf; Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “‘I Am an American Because of Him’: The Journey of Pence’s Grandfather from Ireland,” The New York Times, March 16, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/politics/mike-pence-immigration-grandfather.html.
5. For events surrounding Cawley’s journey to America, see “Irish Rebel Chief Dies After Flight,” The New York Times, April 11, 1923; and P. J. Drudy, The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, and Impact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. “Promise to Unmask Ku Klux in Jersey,” The New York Times, April 11, 1923; “K. of C. Take Charge of Ku Klux Rally,” The New York Times, April 15, 1923; for the definitive review of Grant, see Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009).
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