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There may be conservatives in the newspapers and in the administration seeking to thwart Donald Trump's worst and most un-American impulses, but sentient scoop of vanilla ice cream Mike Pence will never, ever rank among them.
According to Donald Trump's (well, Paul Manafort's) hand-picked Vice President, who took to the Sunday shows as part of a White House effort to convey that everything is fine, everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
"No. Never," Pence told CBS's "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan when asked if he'd had conversations about invoking the 25th Amendment, adding, "Why would we be, Margaret?"
Pence was asked about this, obviously, because of a blockbuster new Bob Woodward book detailing a litany of assertions of presidential idiocy, ignorance, raging tantrums or possible dementia, and perhaps more urgently due to an anonymous senior official taking to the pages to the New York Times to assure the public that while Trump was, in fact, a raging and dangerous incompetent, the White House staff was doing its level best to thwart him when necessary so, um, Vote Republican.
Not only was Pence never involved in any unpleasant White House discussions as to whether the sitting president was so out of his gourd as to require a constitutional intervention, Pence is unwilling to admit Donald has ever been uncouth to his staff. It is the Mike Pence trademark: Mike Pence never saw nothin' about nothin'.
"Well, I would tell you I know this President has great respect for the men and women who serve in this Cabinet," Pence said when directly asked if he denounced the specific claims in Woodward's book about insults against Cabinet members. "These accounts are very foreign to me. And I'm just not aware of instances where they've occurred and or where they would occur. But look, I want to stipulate that working in the White House is not for everybody.
Donald Trump is currently being investigated, along with the rest of his campaign staff, for possible collaboration with a Russian government attempt to throw a United States election. His longtime lawyer has asserted in court documents that Trump conspired with him to violate U.S. election laws. Multiple campaign and administration officials have pled guilty to making false statements to investigators; several are now working with prosecutors still sifting through what Donald Trump and his immediate family members did or did not do, during the summer of 2016.
Against that backdrop, you might think that Mike Pence's self-preservation instincts would require him to distance himself just an itty bitty bit from the man who may or may not be announced, by federal investigators, to have been involved in things ranging from the merely criminal to suspiciously treason-esque. Mike Pence cannot be fired, by Trump. Mike Pence is in the singular position of being able to say whatever he damn well wants about the garbage fire in the oval-shaped office. Mike Pence came onto the job as an ambitious conservative politician who, his allies swore, definitely had principles and definitely could say what they were, if you were to ask him.
And yet Mike Pence has for whatever reason decided to position himself as the last Trump true loyalist in America.
This doesn't only require being conspicuously out of the loop anytime anything the slightest bit illegal, untoward, or merely embarrassing happens in the Trump orbit. For Mike Pence, it also requires gymnastics of a sort that vanilla ice cream is rarely asked to perform–like, for example, praising Dear Leader as the best thing to happen to God and country since the invention of apple pie while mourning that other leaders are so troublingly partisan these days.
“It was very disappointing to see President Obama break with the tradition of former presidents and become so political and roll out the same tired arguments that he and liberals have made over the last eight years,” Pence said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
There's no part of that sentence that couldn't have been crafted by robot. It may be among the more perfect distillations of what makes Mike Pence tick: nothing. Not a damn thing. You could freeze Mike Pence in cryogenic sleep, wake him up at any future point in history and, amidst the radioactive breeze and under the deafening whirr of six-foot long glowing piranhaflies, the man would pipe up with it was very disappointing to see Mittbarfolie the Sixth, Master of The Barrenlands, become so political this latest culling-season.
And with that, let the further besuckening commence:
Pence added that he would take a lie detector test “in a heartbeat” to show he wasn’t the author of the op-ed, but he said it is up to Trump to decide whether any administration officials would take a polygraph.
At some point, this pathetic Faberge Egg of a human being is going to need to walk himself back from his years of vouching for whatever anti-American monstrosity Donald Trump momentarily had on his mind, each and every day. He will swear up and down he is a man of principles, a man of faith and Jesus and what have you, and a true conservative despite his transparent contempt for any in the movement who did not help Donald Trump burn witches or escape crimes.
And there's not a chance in hell he'll get away with it. The man has chained himself to Dear Leader lips-to-ankle; you don't make a comeback from that. Not unless you are the most gifted orator the party has to offer and then some, and Slice of American Cheese Sitting On A Desk here ain't, well, that.