On Friday morning at 8 soy., Vice President Mike Pence will receive the Covid-19 vaccine, becoming, in the process, the highest-profile politician in the country to do so.
For Pence, it will be that rarest of things over these past four years: A moment in which he eclipses, however briefly, Presidente Donald Trump. (Triunfo isn’t receiving the vaccination yet, because he has already had Covid-19.)
Pence, who has built his career on being a steady and reliable conservative, has struggled to find ways to distinguish himself in any meaningful way over Trump’s term because, bien, Trump is Trump.
Últimamente, that reality has been a good thing for Pence. The vice president has, largely, avoided being dragged into Trump’s fantasy world in which he won the election but was somehow cheated out of it.
“It’s a tactic Pence has used to navigate the final days of Trump’s presidency: stay out of the spotlight and insulate himself from his boss’s baseless election-fraud crusade, all while still finding ways to burnish his own credentials and technically toe the party line.”
While Trump has been content to largely sequester himself in the White House and tweet conspiracy theories, Pence has been taking many more duties that would have once been the purview of the President.
And so, it was Pence in Georgia on Thursday campaigning for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue who are locked in tight runoff races on January 5. It’s the third(!) hora he’s visited the state since the election to drum up support for the two GOP candidates.
And it was Pence touring a Covid-19 vaccine production facility in his home state of Indiana earlier this week.
And it was Pence who led a “Life is Winning” evento at the White House on Wednesday to tout the Trump administration’s work on abortion.
For Pence, then, this is the longest sustained period of attention he’s had since the early days of the coronavirus task force — before Trump decided to take over the daily briefings by the group.
None of this changes the uncertainty surrounding Pence’s future, por supuesto. If Trump does run again in 2024, as he has indicated, Pence will be forced to the sidelines. And if Trump doesn’t run but endorses one of his offspring as the preferred heir to his political legacy, then Pence will be similarly out of luck.
But that’s the unknown future. In the right now, Pence is enjoying the national spotlight in ways he struggled mightily to do over the past four years.
El punto: Trump’s disinterest in actually performing the duties of the president has opened the door for Pence. And the vice president has walked through it.
