As President Trump faces increasingly intense scrutiny and calls for his impeachment, one man is patiently waiting in the wings to take over: Vice President Pence.
The presidency is a dream Mike Pence has embraced since high school and he’s been willing to wait and see the hand of God at work in his elevation to the White House should Trump be impeached.
Pence came to believe that the way to his lifelong goal of the Oval Office was to tie his fate to Donald Trump even though he represented everything Christianity abhorred.
During Pence’s first year as vice president, he had one public assignment: admiring Donald Trump.
‘He performed this duty consistently despite the fact that the bellicose and chaotic Trump – he of the infamous ‘grab ’em by the p*ssy’ videotape – was so personally objectionable that Pence had considered trying to replace him at the top of the ticket as the 2016 election neared’, write Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner, authors of The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, published by Thomas Dunne Books, 28 August.
Vice President Mike Pence believed he could get himself into the Oval Office by tying his fate to Trump, a new book has revealed
But Pence endured the embarrassment with a laser-focus on assuming the office of presidency one day.
While waiting for Trump to fall, ‘humble superiority has been Pence’s default setting during his twelve years in Congress and four as Indiana’s governor’, write the authors.
And if there’s much to criticize about Trump, Pence has his own serious shortcomings besides blind ambition, the authors contend.
In the House, he was not personally popular and members of his own party kept him at arm’s length.
No one knew who the real Mike Pence was.
‘Pence was five-term member of the House who had focused on climbing the ladder of party leadership but never chaired a major committee or authored a single successful piece of legislation,’ write D’Antonio and Fraser.
The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, published by Thomas Dunne Books will hit stands on August 28
Pence has denied climate change and questioned the established fact that smoking causes cancer because he has connected with wealthy donors – warriors of the Christian right – the billionaire DeVos and Koch families who deny science behind environmental protection, demanded tax cuts for themselves as well as insisting on massive reductions in programs serving anyone who wasn’t rich.
Their ideology is Christian supremacy and predatory Capitalism.
Pence got in bed with them and needed their money in his race for governor in Indiana.
Pence also needed money from assorted drug companies – even ones that had been maligned for price gouging.
He got funding from one health care firm– that sold products like an ointment called Boudroux’s Butt Paste and Encare, a spermicidal suppository.
Money was money to Pence and led to ‘some questionable financial arrangements – and one of his biggest mistakes in the 1990 election rematch with Phil Sharp’, for the governor’s race in Indiana, according to the authors.
His error was setting up a business to take out loans and make personal payments for his own use — paying off personal credit card bills, his mortgage, the loan on his wife’s car, groceries, parking tickets and golf outings.
Pence’s response: ‘I need to make a living’.
Supremely ambitious, he used dirty tricks as a campaigner – including racist advertisements and fake community organizations to smear his opponents.
During his first year as vice president, Pence had one public assignment: admiring Donald Trump – a duty he performed consistently even though he went against his Christian values
Now his hair started to turn gray and he took to wearing glasses.
His first campaign efforts had been riding a bicycle around town and shaking hands while using a counter to keep track of the number of handshakes.
When Pence lost that race for the second time, he had no profession to return to and wasn’t qualified to work in government, so he started a radio broadcasting career in 1994 with The Mike Pence Show.
Radio Mike broadcast his views, read the Bible, and did impressions of Bill Clinton.
That progressed to a television show and he segued into making contact with top political figures and wealthy potential campaign donors of like-mind – extremely conservative.
When he was elected governor in 2013, Pence kept banker’s hours. To other governors, it was a twenty-four-hours-a-day job.
‘My impression of Mike is that he does not like to work very hard, and he’s not that intellectually curious,’ state Ann DeLaney, once head of the Democratic Party in the state.
When he was finally elected governor, Pence began wearing custom-embroidered clothes – dress shorts, polo shirts, and vest and jackets – all decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana
She saw traits in Pence that made him ‘ill-suited to the executive branch of government. I mean the bible is nice. I’m happy for him that he reads the bible. But he needs to read other things besides that. It’s my impression that he doesn’t’.
But he wasn’t indifferent to wardrobe when finally elected governor.
He ordered custom-embroidered clothes – dress shorts, polo shirts, and vest and jackets – all decorated with his name and the words Governor of Indiana.
Some of the wardrobe had the state symbol – a gold torch and nineteen stars.
This was a first for an Indiana governor ordering official wardrobe.
His ambitions were obvious. In the spring of 2013, he was viewed as a top ten contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016 — despite starting behind other hopefuls when he was a first-term governor of a Midwestern state.
He had already consulted with national pollster Kellyanne Conway and was still a favorite of the Koch brothers who had donated $200,000 to his campaign.
One repulsive habit he had was that he was into rubbing shoulders.
He would suddenly come up behind someone and start massaging their shoulders.
He often did it to members of the Indiana press corps.
‘Grabbing, a real quick grasping thing’, according to John Krull, who had been with The Indianapolis News.
‘That’s not something I would do with someone else without an engraved invitation’, Krull said.
This physical greeting communicated volumes – a bonding move and aggression. Older politicians shake hands, touch shoulders, lean into each other – ‘and viewed as great ape dominance behavior indulged by men in suits and ties’, write the authors.
But he wasn’t rubbing shoulders with the poor, underprivileged or drug addicted who needed his help back in Indiana.
Future president and first lady? Mike and Karen Pence married in 1985. The book has revealed how the second lady found Trump ‘reprehensible — just totally vile’ after the tapes emerged
His usual retort: ‘It’s under consideration’.
When a black man Keith Cooper was erroneous convicted of a robbery and shooting that got him a forty-year sentence, it later came out that witnesses had suppressed DNA evidence at the time of the trial.
The Indiana Court of Appeals ordered Cooper’s release in 2006 but the felony charge remained on the books coming up every time he applied for a job.
An attorney asked the Parole Board to approve a pardon and unanimously recommended that Gov. Pence grant that request. Pence mad no decision on the Cooper Case and never explained his inaction after three years.
His inaction was viewed as cruel and thoughtless as a powerful official showing that he was tough on crime. But Cooper had committed no crime.
As Governor, he treated a lead poisoning disaster in East Chicago, Indiana with benign neglect. He refused to declare a state of emergency requested by the city’s mayor and never visited the site.
He ignored the fact that children were exposed to toxins at fifty times the accepted level.
Pence was chastised for his inaction but his commitment to his Christian beliefs reverberated on a national stage.
It is his idea to return to saying ‘Merry Christmas’ – that Trump has been verbalizing while out stumping for the 2018 elections of governors.
Saying Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas was prosecuting a war on Christmas, according to Pence.
The politics Pence practices reflect his ‘evangelical Catholic’ faith that believes the bible is literal truth handed down by God and free of error.
Those beliefs include’ Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the Church, his body and is himself its Savior’.
When Pence moved to Indianapolis and failed the admissions test for law school before taking it a second time and finally passing, he attended the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church where he met karen Sue Batten Whitaker who often played guitar at mass.
He fell in love.
She was two years older and a second-grade teacher previously married.
She had been a better student in high school than Pence while he only had a B average.
She married her first husband, who was studying medicine and who became a drug company executive reponsible for the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis.
Expecting she would marry Pence, she bought a small gold cross and had it engraved with the word ‘Yes’.
She carried it in her purse.
He bought a ring and hid it inside a loaf of bread he would carry on walks together to feed ducks.
The big moment arrived. He pulled out the ring and she gave him the cross.
They tied the knot in June 1985.
He returned to law school and Karen went back to teaching second graders at an elementary school in southeast Indianapolis.
When he graduated law school in 1986, she was ready to help him make his big move into politics.
For Mike and Karen Pence who were married in 1985, her second marriage, this strict preaching gave them boundaries that make their life seem more ordered – as well as supporting preexisting beliefs such as homosexuality as a sinful state.
When Karen couldn’t conceive for six years, she experienced a crisis of faith.
They tried a treatment called GIFT, not accepted by many Catholic authorities that viewed it as defying conception.
GIFT, famete intrafallopian transfer, involves fertilizing the eggs outside of the body, collecting semen in a condom.
When they stopped the process, she became pregnant at 34 and they had a son, Michael Jr., born in 1991 and then two daughters, Audrey and Charlotte.
Pence was now the sole wage earner after Karen had given up teaching and he started making more money when Radio Mike progressed to TV Mike.
They fervently believe that some people are held closer to God than others – and that includes Mike Pence, say the authors.
‘It is this favored position, preordained by God, that explains their world success’, they write – and Pence believes he ‘was ranked closer to god than most other mortals’ — but not without thanks to his corporate sponsors all locked in on anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, and pro big-business issues.
He named her as the state’s bicentennial ambassador when Indiana approached the bicentennial of its statehood and she traveled the state promoting Indiana history in 2016.
When the ‘p*ssy tape emerged, Karen viewed Trump as ‘reprehensible — just totally vile’ and one news report stated that the Pences refused to take Trumps phone calls. They were going to assess whether Mike was going to remain on the ticket.
Pence stated he was ‘offended’ by the tape. ‘I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them’, he said.
The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, is available on Amazon