While Donald Trump has been busy exerting plenty of sporadic unilateral control over regulatory issues like the AT&T/Time Warner merger, his right-hand man Mike Pence has been elbowing his way into position to lead the Republican Party. One example: even though Trump declined to anoint a successor for the seat of retiring Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Pence happily tweeted his support to the candidate of Hensarling's choosing, Bunni Pounds. Trump's aides were "blindsided" by the move, writes the New York Times.
The eager assistance Mr. Pence provided a senior lawmaker reflected the outsized political portfolio that the vice president and his aides have seized for themselves as the 2018 elections approach. While Mr. Trump remains an overpowering personality in Republican politics, he is mostly uninterested in the mechanics of managing a political party. His team of advisers is riven with personal divisions and the White House has not yet crafted a strategy for the midterms. So Mr. Trump’s supremely disciplined running mate has stepped into the void.
Republican officials now see Mr. Pence as seeking to exercise expansive control over a political party ostensibly helmed by Mr. Trump, tending to his own allies and interests even when the president’s instincts lean in another direction. Even as he laces his public remarks with praise for the president, Mr. Pence and his influential chief of staff, Nick Ayers, are unsettling a group of Mr. Trump’s fierce loyalists who fear they are forging a separate power base.
Pence is such a perfect evangelical leader: Claiming his fealty to something in principle, but ultimately just using it to his political advantage in practice.
Word of the internal tensions is getting out beyond the walls of the White House: one prominent lawmaker said the complaints of high-ranking Trump officials were starting to circulate on Capitol Hill. [...]
Tensions also flared last year, after Mr. Ayers and another Pence aide were reported to have made suggestive comments to Republican donors about planning for an unpredictable 2020 election. Most brazenly, Marty Obst, a senior Pence adviser, told a Republican donor that Mr. Pence wanted to be prepared for the next presidential race in case there was an opening.
Yep: watch your back, Trump, old boy. You're just one serious misstep away from Pence pushing you over the cliff, so to speak. Indictment ... impeachment ... whatever, Pence will surely be there for you.