Mike
Pence’s Trumpian Makeover
October 8, 2020
At the Vice-Presidential debate, on Wednesday,
Mike Pence’s transformation into a lower-decibel version of the President was
on full display.
In April, as the
country’s coronavirus outbreak surged, President
Trump mocked Mike
Pence’s filibustering skills, presenting himself as a teller of
tough truths compared with his slippery Vice-President. “That’s one of the
greatest answers I’ve ever heard, because Mike was able to speak for five
minutes and not even touch your question,” Trump said in a press briefing after
Pence avoided answering a reporter. “I said, that’s what you call a great
professional.” Throughout Wednesday night’s debate, Trump’s version of Pence
was fully on display, as the Vice-President ducked questions and outright
refused to answer them for much of the ninety minutes.
Perhaps
most significant, given that Trump is currently stricken with the coronavirus
that he denied was an ongoing threat to the American people, Pence refused to
say whether he had discussed the issue of “Presidential disability” with Trump.
But this particular dodge hardly stood out on a night when Pence avoided more
of moderator Susan Page’s questions than he answered. The Vice-President began
the debate by refusing to say why the United States has had so many more deaths
from the coronavirus than other leading nations. He ended it by refusing to say
whether he would accept the peaceful transfer of power after the election. In
between, Pence managed to avoid numerous other questions, from whether he
believes climate change is an “existential threat” to what the Administration’s
plan is for providing health care to Americans with preëxisting conditions. For
much of the debate, in fact, Pence seemed more eager to deliver pre-planned
attack lines against his Democratic opponent, Senator Kamala
Harris, than he was to defend the Trump-Pence Administration’s
record.
Harris,
a sharp-tongued former prosecutor whose appointment to the ticket this summer
immediately raised expectations for this debate with Pence, proved to be an
agile and at times eloquent opponent. She was especially pointed on the subject
that Pence least wanted to discuss: the Administration’s abysmal handling of
the pandemic. Harris’s first line of the debate was also one of her best, calling
the incumbent’s response to the coronavirus “the greatest failure of any
Presidential Administration in the history of our country,” which sounds like
an exaggeration until you remember that the covid-19 death toll is already the largest mass-casualty
event in American history aside from the Second World War, the 1918 influenza
pandemic, and the Civil War. The only candidate on either ticket who has not
held national office before, Harris had the most to prove going into the debate
in Salt Lake City, and she did so while dodging a few questions of her own
along the way. Do she and Joe Biden plan to pack the Supreme Court in response
to the Republicans’ plan to ram through a new Justice days before the election?
Does she think Biden has been forthcoming enough about his health, given that
he will be the oldest President ever elected if he wins on November 3rd? We
don’t know, because Harris would not answer.
Both
Harris and Pence are younger and far more articulate politicians than their
running mates, fully capable of holding their own in a televised argument that
cleared the low bar of not degenerating into a food fight at a senior-citizens’
center. The debate seemed sort of normal—at least after Trump’s frenetic
performance of a week earlier. But the more I listened to Pence the more I
realized that the Vice-President of 2020 is no longer the deeply conventional,
if fervently right-wing, evangelical of four years ago. Or even the oleaginous
Trump suck-up he has been for much of the Administration’s tenure. He has been
changed, and radically so, by his association with the President, and Wednesday
night showed something both new and disturbing: Pence has come to resemble a
lower-decibel Trump, lying with a fluency and brazenness that might have
shocked his former moralistic self.
Once
presented as the acceptable public front for Trumpism to those who might be
offended by the President’s grosser displays of ego and misogyny, this new
Pence was ruder and cruder, and he spent much of the evening interrupting the
two women with whom he shared the stage, refusing to listen when the moderator
implored him to follow the rules, and simply seizing extra time to rebut Harris
whether Page offered it or not. This Pence was not the Middle American cleanup
man of this spring’s anxious coronavirus press conferences; he was nasty, an
elbow-thrower who dropped snide references to Biden as a plagiarist, inserted
random media-bashing into long-winded soliloquies, and peddled a pet Trump
conspiracy theory about the 2016 campaign. Like the boss, he repeated
falsehoods about the Democratic platform with abandon—they are going to raise
your taxes “on Day One” and “abolish” fossil fuels and eliminate fracking and
allow taxpayer-funded abortions “up to the moment of birth”—all of which was
not only untrue but so exaggerated beyond the actual Democratic platform that
it was hard to imagine anyone but the most diehard Republican believing it.
This sounded like Donald Trump talking, not Mike Pence. A quieter, less
bombastic Donald Trump, to be sure, but Trump nonetheless.
Mike Pence wasn’t the
only public official who channelled his inner Trump this week. For the last few
days, the White House physician, Dr. Sean Conley, has been doing a pretty good
impression of the reality-denying President, including misleading the public
about Trump’s health in order to leave what the doctor called an “upbeat”
impression. On Wednesday, with even basic questions about how and when Trump
contracted the illness still unanswered, Conley released an official statement
to the public about the President’s treatment for a potentially lethal disease
that began by saying, “The president this morning says, ‘I feel great!’ ”
That must surely be the first known use of an exclamation point and a quote
from a patient in an official medical document meant to provide critical health
information to the American people.
The
good doctor is merely the latest aide in this White House to find out what
Pence has clearly learned: when the approach of a President running for reëlection
in the midst of a deadly pandemic is to deny its seriousness, then all those in
his orbit will be sucked into progressively more humiliating and absurd efforts
to go along with the ruse. This was bizarre enough as a strategy back in March
and April, when relatively few Americans had yet to die of covid-19. It is more or less politically
impossible now, when so many thousands have perished and the United States’
response is a global embarrassment.
Trump,
though, is immune to embarrassment—his lack of shame has long been one of his
political superpowers—and so it must be for those around him. Among the many
questions that Pence refused to answer was one of the week’s more obvious,
given the large cluster of coronavirus cases in the White House and the
President’s own illness after months of refusing to wear a mask or observe
social distancing: Why should the American people listen when you tell them to
abide by public-health guidelines that you yourself refuse to follow? Pence’s
response was a model of misdirection, which had something to do with the Green
New Deal and the coming government takeover of health care under the
radical-left Democrats. Harris could only look on in amazement, shaking her
head at the brazenness.
None
of it really mattered, of course. No matter how much of a Trumpian makeover
Mike Pence has undergone, Vice-Presidential debates do not change the outcome
of Presidential elections. This one won’t either. By the time a fly improbably
showed up on Pence’s close-cropped white hair and stayed there, without the
Vice-President even appearing to notice, for a good two minutes, it was clear
who the evening’s real winner would be. It was the fly, who will surely be
remembered in debate history after all of Pence’s whoppers are long forgotten.
