by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
On a surface level, VP Mike Pence is sitting pretty. He’s a Constitutional officer and all he has to do is not get fired from the ticket in 2020. That’s it. That’s all he has to do. As long he can swat Ivanka and Jared away long enough to be on the ticket again, he’s got a straight shot to the presidency in 2024.
And, yet.
There’s a problem. A big problem — Trump.
So, this makes things more complicated. If Trump gets both impeached and convicted, then Pence, in a sense, is the ultimate winner. But this “winning” brings with it some serious, complex problems. Pence if he wants to win as a conventional pol will have to at least attempt to reach out to the 60 odd percent of the electorate who are likely to hate his guts by the time Trump is finally removed from office by the Senate. At the same time, he has to worry about alienating the MAGA base of whom he really only has a solid claim to a subset of, the Evangelical vote. Compared to the always entertaining in a bonkers way Trump, Pence is actually just a very conservative traditional Republican.
A President Pence going into the 2020 election cycle would have half a dozen challengers coming at him from the MAGA right. All of them willing to be just a nuts as Trump, but also younger and more passionate in their hatred of brown people.
And, then, there’s the existential issue of giving Trump a Nixon-level pardon post presidency. That’s a question I simply can’t answer knowing what I know superficially. Logically, Pence would given Trump a full pardon and then simply try to tell it in a more articulate manner than Ford did. Or he could try to dodge the question until after the election and turn around and do just that. His thinking would be people would be luzling his pardon by the time he ran again in 2024. If he doesn’t pardon Trump and he is convicted by, say, the SDNY or New York State then, wow. That would be a pretty out-of-character and, relative to the base, dick move.
Pence wants it both ways. He wants to show absolute fealty to The Dear Leader while at the same time having the option of using his traditional pol skillset to hoodwink more moderate independants. The only problem for him there is, well, he’s so astonishingly conservative relative to the practical center of modern American politics that him trying to pull a fast one on enough middle aged center-Left women to get re-elected is debatable.
What’s more, there are some serious landmines lurking out there in the near future. Roe could be overturned. ObamaCare could be overturned. Or both of them could be overturned. If anything like that happened, it would roll the American political system in some unprecedented ways.
But, in general, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I have some hunches, but we’ll know more when Trump’s political fate is ultimately decided.
