With President Trump facing an impeachment inquiry, Democrats emboldened, and many Republicans distinctly queasy about the July 25 phone call to his counterpart in Ukraine, some in the GOP are beginning to consider the possibility of Mike Pence becoming the 46th President of the United States.
There is a long way to go before Trump is convicted of “high crimes and misdemeanors” by a two-thirds majority of a Republican-controlled Senate. But with events moving at remarkable speed and the president himself launching intemperate tirades via Twitter, some officials are starting to think about a President Pence.
If Pence, 60, were to occupy the Oval Office, former aides and biographers say, expect a more conventional presentational style rather than a major shift away from the populist policy proposals of Trump’s White House.
Although Pence allies are cautious to the point of paranoia about imagining life after impeachment, some privately said they would expect to see a more cautious and thoughtful White House emerge.
One pointed to an episode in 2017 when the chief of staff to both president and vice-president departed on the same day. While Trump fired Reince Priebus by tweet as he sat waiting for the president to leave Air Force One, farcically forcing other aides to abandon Priebus’ car, Josh Pitcock stepped down from the vice-president’s office in a move announced a month earlier, giving way to another longtime staffer.
“Polar opposites,” is how one former Pence aide described the differences in culture and staffs between the two offices.
The idea will excite many on the more traditional side of the Republican Party, who long for a return to a more conventional presidency.
A former congressman — he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2000 — and governor of Indiana, Pence is known as a movement conservative which would make him, in the eyes of party stalwarts, a safe and predictably reliable Republican in the White House in a way that Trump, a former Democrat who had a history of many liberal political pronouncements, has never been.
In many respects, the quiet, evangelical Christian vice-president, famous for not dining alone with a woman other than his wife, could not be more different from Trump. In 1991, after his first congressional campaign ended in defeat, he even declared that “negative campaigning is wrong.”
But for Tom LoBianco, author of a new Pence biography Piety & Power, replacing one with the other may not cause a huge change in political direction. “It’s not so much of a policy change, it would be a stylistic change,” he said.
“You would see things calm down significantly, He’s not a guy who’s going to be tweeting random things. I can pretty much guarantee you will never see a tweet storm from Mike Pence.”
The socially conservative direction — anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage — would stay much the same. “He would probably be a return to a George W. Bush style of conservatism, albeit a bit more conservative, given his history and what I know of him,” he said.
Andrea Neal, author of the biography Pence: That Path to Power said he was more likely to start his day in prayer than on Twitter. But she said the biggest policy changes might arrive through his belief in small government and fiscal conservatism.
“The guy who advocated limited government at every turn — and maybe Trump has advanced that through deregulation — but I have to think that Pence would be more vocal and more visibly promoting government policies to bring down the debt and rein in deficit spending,” she said.
But Pence is unlikely to roll back Trump’s protectionist stance and return to the sort of free market policies he espoused as a candidate in Indiana in 2000, LoBianco said.
Whether his own thinking on the subject has changed, he will have seen how Trump’s instinctive message played in states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on his way to an electoral college win.
“Would he revert back? I don’t think so. There’s a political calculus that you have to win the Rust Belt,” he said. “So I think he would try to stay in Trump’s lane because he would want to be elected to the White House in his own right.”
