Vice President Mike Pence has either ‘solved the riddle’ of how to work for Donald Trump or he’s ‘well short of intelligent,’ his White House colleagues told the author of a bombshell book on the 45th president’s first year in office.
Former deputy White House chief of staff Katie Walsh is quoted as saying, ‘Pence is not dumb.’ But the president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner – and others in the White House, apparently – don’t see it the same way.
‘Many’ called him an ’empty suit,’ author Michael Wolff writes in ‘Fire and Fury.’
‘The Jarvanka side credited Pence’s wife, Karen, as the guiding hand behind his convenient meekness.’
Vice President Mike Pence has either ‘solved the riddle’ of how to work for Donald Trump or he’s ‘well short of intelligent,’ his White House colleagues told the author of a bombshell book on the 45th president’s first year in office
‘Indeed, he took to this role so well that, later, his extreme submissiveness struck some as suspicious,’ the author says.
The president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner see Pence as a ‘point of grateful amusement’ in the White House, the book says
Pence is barely talked about in Wolff’s White House thriller after staying so under the radar in the administration that he was seen as either ‘feigning an old-fashioned, what-meworry, standard-issue veep identity lest he upset his patron or, in fact, honestly acknowledging who he was.’
‘ “I do funerals and ribbon cuttings,” ‘ Wolff says Pence, a former Indiana congressman, once told a former Capitol Hill colleague.
Wolff writes that ‘Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the shadow of Donald Trump.
‘In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president who could not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme selfeffacement.’
Other West Wing aides believe that Pence is ‘well short of intelligent,’ Wolff writes. ‘And because he wasn’t smart, he was not able to provide any leadership ballast.’
Their assessment that Pence was not-so-bright came is set against a backdrop of a president who the author suggests is in mental declined, repeating the same stories over and over again and failing to recognize old friends.
‘Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing,’ Wolff writes.
FALLBACK GUY: Pence is barely talked about in the book after staying so under the radar that he was seen as either ‘feigning an old-fashioned, what-meworry, standard-issue veep identity lest he upset his patron or, in fact, honestly acknowledging who he was.’
To Jared and Ivanka, referred to as ‘Jarvanka’ in the book, Pence is a ‘point of grateful amusement’ in the White House.
‘He was almost absurdly happy to be Donald Trump’s vice president, happy to play the role of exactly the kind of vice president that would not ruffle Trump’s feathers,’ Wolff writes.
Had it not been for former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had a falling out with Trump over his own quotes in the book, ‘a hapless Pence’ would have continued on in his role.
It was Bannon’s idea, Wolff writes, for Pence to hire young gun Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, to get ‘ “our fallback guy” out of the White House and “running around the world and looking like a vice president.”
Pence was otherwise described as ‘a cipher, a smiling presence either resisting his own obvious power or unable to seize it,’ in the book the White House has said is ‘full of lies.’