Maxine Waters is one of Donald Trump's most dedicated and vociferous detractors. The Hill reports that Waters predicts Mike Pence is preparing for Trump's impeachment:
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) suggested on Saturday that Vice President Pence is already planning his inauguration in anticipation of President Trump's impeachment.
"Mike Pence is somewhere planning an inauguration.Priebus and Spicer will lead the transition," Waters wrote on Twitter, referring to former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, both of whom resigned their positions over the past week.
Maxine might be right. One thing is for certain. On July 30 Pence flies to Estonia then on to Georgia and Montenegro to quell the fears that America's European allies have expressed regarding not only Donald Trump's continued high endorsement of Vladimir Putin but more importantly his extreme reluctance to reaffirm the United States' commitment to NATO:
I think there is no question that Vice President Pence is meant to be the grown-up in the White House when it comes to European security and NATO policy," said Norman Naimark, professor of East European Studies, History and German Studies at Stanford University via email. "I think it is a very good move on the part of the White House, maybe encouraged by the State Department, to send Pence to these countries," he told DW.
The aim of the vice president's trip, said Mariya Omelicheva, a Eurasian security scholar at the University of Kansas, is to "reiterate the US' continued commitment to Euro-Atlantic security, NATO, and the latter's collective defense principle. As a candidate and, now, the President, Trump made the East and Central European states, the former members of the Warsaw pact and republics of the Soviet Union, very nervous."
The timing of Mike Pence's reassurance trip to the Baltics is impeccable since Russia will hold a large military exercise along its western borders and in Belarus in September. Moscow's war games involving tens of thousands of troops has had officials from the the Baltics, the United States, and NATO plenty worried.
While the horse and pony show goes on in the White House people who know how to govern are clearly governing behind the scenes and Mike Pence is playing the role not only of the grown up in the Party, but also the image of Republican stability in the world theater, a role which Donald Trump is quite evidently constitutionally incapable of playing. The GOP banked on Trump becoming presidential in time and with guidance but has apparently abandoned that game plan in favor of making Mike Pence the face of the Republican party.