And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”
—Isaiah 6:8
Like all vice presidents, who are elected mainly to ensure continuity should the president be unable to serve, Mike Pence was concerned about his role. Uncertain about the influence and power he would hold, he cast about for an interest to nurture. He had always been interested in space, and Trump had pledged during the campaign that he would “revive” America’s space program. Allergic to anything done by his predecessor, Trump was not about to accept or endorse plans designed during the Obama administration for human missions to an asteroid in the 2020s and a manned Mars journey in the 2030s. However, he had no ideas of his own, save for Buck Rogers fantasies like the creation of a “Space Command” at the Defense Department. (The Pentagon had a well-established system for managing its space resources, and exploration was not part of its mission.)
Sensing an opening, Pence jumped the gun on Trump’s plan in March 2017 by saying that he would be the chairman of the long-dormant National Space Council, an advisory group that Pence’s fellow Hoosier, Vice President Dan Quayle, had led during the George H. W. Bush administration. The idea of having such a council was better on paper than in reality. In the past, members who were political appointees had clashed with officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, who were actual experts. Nevertheless, Trump did sign an order reestablishing the council and put Pence in charge. “Today’s announcement sends a clear signal to the world that we are restoring America’s proud legacy of leadership in space,” Trump said at a ceremony where he was surrounded by NASA officials and retired astronauts. “Our vice president cares very deeply about space policy, and for good reason. Space exploration is not only essential to our character as a nation but also our economy and our great nation’s security.”
The vice president now set out to make his role a prominent one. Here was an outlet for his energy that came with the chance to rub elbows with the titans of the aerospace industry who were also potential campaign donors. As an extra bonus, Pence would get the chance to go behind the scenes where astronauts, scientists, and engineers did their work. An opportunity for this kind of fun came at Cape Canaveral in early July 2017. On a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, Pence approached the ten-ton Orion multiuse spacecraft, which is designed to replace the retired space shuttle. Accompanied by Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio, Pence solemnly reached out and placed his palm on the craft’s titanium forward bay door. A sign in bold was affixed inches from his hand: CRITICAL SPACE FLIGHT HARDWARE. Below it was a large warning in red capital letters: DO NOT TOUCH.
A photograph captured the moment; memes and endless jokes flew across the internet. “Pence looked left. Then right,” tweeted writer Jason Miller. “Mother wasn’t anywhere around. He smiled to himself. He would touch.” Some people combined the picture with an image of Chris Christie on the beach; others manipulated it to show Pence touching the butt of a male stripper, or stroking the belly of a crocodile.
Pence retreated to Washington. His staff, knowing the power of ridicule, went into full damage control mode. A coterie of communications aides came in and out of the vice president’s office with drafts of tweets—they had to do something, but what? Pence was exasperated and didn’t see a problem. What was the big deal? His aides laughed and realized the best option was to get in on the joke. They sent out their own tweets, blurring the warning sign with the message: “Sorry @NASA … @MarcoRubio dared me to do it!” Next, they distributed a photo of Pence reaching out to touch a porcupine with the caption: “OK, so this isn’t exactly the first time this has happened.”
The self-deprecation, something the president couldn’t do, inoculated Pence against more ridicule. It also pointed out the great difference between the VP’s social media profile and the president’s. The tweeter in chief was a sputtering font of anger and ridicule, and his social media blasts revealed him to be stuck in old conflicts. Irritated by the fact that Hillary Clinton had bested him in the popular vote by nearly three million, Trump repeatedly alleged, without providing a scintilla of evidence, that most of those votes were illegally cast.
* * *
Trump’s obsession gave Pence another opening. On the extreme right, voter fraud had been a kind of MacGuffin—a plot device with no meaning—for many years. Time and again, claims of double-voting, noncitizens at the polls, and even ballots cast by the deceased were lodged and then disproved. Multiple nonpartisan studies have shown that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. One researcher found only 31 possible cases of fraud in one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014, with no sign of a change since then.1
Despite the evidence that fraud was not a problem, Republicans had pushed for laws that required state identification at the polls. This practice ran counter to long-established practices and put a burden on poorer citizens, who were known to vote for Democrats in greater numbers. (The head of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania had admitted the purpose was to suppress votes for Democrats.) The issue also played into anti-immigrant sentiment that politicians like Trump encouraged to energize supporters. Once Trump was elected, it became a cause that could be pursued with the might of the federal government. Encouraged by his most aggressive aide, Steve Bannon, Trump created a commission that would investigate this nonproblem and presumably prove he was right. Mike Pence, who knew how to please people in general and the president in particular, became the ideal choice to lead it. The mission not only fit his personality, but also aligned with his increasing interest in representing Trump to the world at large as a most commanding and popular leader.
Before the new administration had taken office, Pence had shown he was willing to indulge Trump’s voter fraud fantasy. When asked by interviewer George Stephanopoulos about the voter fraud charge, Pence wouldn’t deal with the substance of Trump’s claims. Instead, he chose to talk about how it was okay for him to make them. “It’s his right to express his opinion as president-elect of the United States,” Pence told Stephanopoulos. “I think one of the things that’s refreshing about our president-elect and one of the reasons why I think he made such an incredible connection with people all across this country is because he tells you what’s on his mind.”
“But why is it refreshing to make false statements?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“I don’t know that that is a false statement, George, and neither do you,” Pence said.
“I know there’s no evidence for it,” Stephanopoulos replied.
* * *
Pence had prior history with the issue. When he was governor of Indiana, the state police charged canvassers for the Indiana Voter Registration Project, which was supported by a liberal Washington funder, with attempting to register nonexistent voters. Indiana secretary of state Connie Lawson even went so far as to declare, “Nefarious actors are operating here in Indiana. A group by the name of the Indiana Voter Registration Project has forged voter registrations.”
The “nefarious” activity prompted Lawson and Pence to sound an alarm in the news media and launch an investigation that covered most of the state. It all turned out to be a minor incident, inflated in good part because the Republican state government recognized that the voter registrations were likely to bring mostly Democratic voters onto the rolls. Officials at the Indiana Voter Registration Project had gathered about 45,000 voter registrations, mostly in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Marion County, in the Indianapolis suburbs. After officials at the Voter Project office fired several canvassers for turning in questionable voter cards, they segregated and flagged those registration forms and handed them over to local election clerks, as they were required to do by law. Project officials said the bad forms might have amounted to less than 10 percent of the 45,000 voter registrations they had gathered. Ultimately, a prosecutor would determine “that these are not allegations of voter fraud nor is there any evidence to suggest that voter fraud was the alleged motivation.” For his part, Pence honored Lawson with a prestigious state award naming her a Sagamore of the Wabash. It was one of his last acts as governor.2
On the federal commission, Pence would be aided by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who had campaigned for the office on the unfounded charge that “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive.” After winning, he began an intense effort to scrutinize registrations, which led to about 15 percent of newcomers being blocked in their attempts to get on the rolls. As he oversaw this effort, Kobach crisscrossed the nation speaking to conservatives about his successes. His cause would eventually fail, as a federal judge found he had violated the rights of roughly thirty-five thousand people, mostly young college students. In the meantime, however, Kobach had won the short-term victory of preventing people who were more likely to vote for Democrats from exercising their franchise.
As Trump announced the creation of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, he mentioned the “sacred integrity of the ballot box and the principle of one citizen one vote.” Pence was willing to promote a fake issue that didn’t exist instead of dealing with the real problem, which Trump refused to address—Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and the prospects for more of the same in 2018.
On the same week when commission members convened, Kobach was fined by a federal judge, who said he had misled his court in a voter fraud case.3 Concurrently, state and local officials who handled elections around the country were refusing to hand over documents requested by Kobach and Pence. The sweeping request would have put every voter’s name and contact information into a single database that would have been under federal control. As many Republican secretaries of state noted, Connie Lawson of Indiana included, this collection would trample on the states’ constitutional obligation to maintain the records themselves. Almost all of them refused to comply.
At the first meeting of the voter fraud commission, Pence sought to paint a dire picture. “President Trump knows that the integrity of our electoral system transcends party lines,” Pence said unabashedly with no sense of the irony his statement represented. “I’m grateful this commission has brought together a bipartisan group from the federal, state, and local level. Together, this bipartisan group will perform a truly nonpartisan service to the American people.”4 The panel heard from a few academic experts, who noted that fraud was rare to nonexistent in American elections. Kobach issued a dramatic claim that the results of a Senate election in New Hampshire had been decided by five thousand out-of-state nonresidents who had voted illegally. “Now there’s proof,” Kobach said. “It is highly likely that voting by nonresidents changed the result.” The problem with Kobach’s claim was that the so-called ineligible voters were college students who, though possessing out-of-state driver’s licenses, merely had to declare themselves residents in order to register and vote legally.
The commission would soon be disbanded by a frustrated President Trump. Mike Pence would attend only its first meeting. He had lent his credibility to the effort, however, and added to the problem of the distortion of reality in American political life. As the commission was shut down, more than half of Trump voters told pollsters they thought that Trump had actually won the popular vote but fraud had blocked a true result. In fact, as The Washington Post reported, the 2016 election saw only four documented cases of voter fraud: “Two of those fraud cases involved Trump voters trying to vote twice, one involved a Republican election judge trying to fill out a ballot on behalf of her dead husband, and the last involved a poll worker filling in bubbles for a mayoral candidate in absentee ballots in Florida.”5
Thus, Mike Pence was willing to say on national television—before the always skeptical George Stephanopoulos—that Trump’s crusade against voter fraud was legitimate. During and after the election, Pence had established himself as a reliable supporter of Trump’s most unreliable claims. Pence was so resolute in his commitment that even when he wasn’t speaking, his body language and his facial expressions showed that he felt Trump could do no wrong. Time and again, Pence stood beside or behind Trump and beamed with such adoration that pundits likened the look on his face to the wide-eyed gaze that Nancy Reagan fixed on her husband when they were together. The smile and the bright-eyed focus made Pence look almost as if he were in love, and then, when he spoke, he seemed to affirm this feeling.
Always careful to subsume his ego and glorify Trump, he followed a formula. “I bring you greetings from the president of the United States,” he told people at campaign rallies around the United States. “I can tell you firsthand, our president is a man with broad shoulders and a big heart. His vision, his energy, his optimism are boundless, and I know that he will make America great again.”6
At the administration’s first full cabinet meeting, an unctuous Pence spoke as if he had forgotten his marriage and three children: “It is the greatest privilege of my life,” he said, “to serve as vice president to a president who’s keeping his word to the American people.”
Pence had set the tone, and the other cabinet members followed through with equally obsequious words of praise. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had angered Trump by recusing himself from the Russian matter, said, “It’s an honor to be able to serve you, to set the exact right message, and the response is fabulous around the country.” Reince Priebus, chief of staff, said, “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”
Trump worked his way around the table, nodding at each member of the cabinet and gazing at them as they introduced themselves like attendees at a seminar and spoke their words of praise. It was a display that would have seemed absurd in the context of any government setting, but in the seat of the American democracy, which was founded on the rejection of the British monarchy, it was grotesque in every way. When the love-fest-on-command was over, Trump said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” a cue for his staff to shoo reporters out of the room. That evening, the video of the ego-stroking was played over and over on talk and comedy shows as commentators struggled to understand how grown men and women, purportedly some of the most accomplished people in the country, could debase themselves in such a craven way.
In Indiana, people who knew Pence and had observed him for years considered the performance and wondered if he really did respect the chaotic Trump or if he was playacting in order to be of service to his country. Supporters said that Pence backed Trump, despite his flaws, out of a sense of patriotic duty. Critics, like Ann DeLaney, an Indiana Democrat, said that, given Trump’s scandals, it looked to her like hypocrisy. “Mike is enabling him,” DeLaney said. “I mean, he’s standing up in front of the evangelicals and those that are religious in this country and saying, ‘This is a good man, despite all of that.’”
Not so, said Sherman Johnson, his onetime congressional campaign manager and a conservative Republican. Pence’s prime role is to serve Trump, he said. “I really think if you’re a good vice president,” said Johnson, “your name was not at the top of the ballot, this other guy’s was, and you pretty much knew what you were getting into when you accepted the offer. And your job is to … is to counsel the president in … in private, not take your laundry out in public and don’t create friction where it’s not necessary.”
If what Johnson said was true for all U.S. vice presidents, it was more so the case than ever with Trump. The president was such a temperamental and sensitive person that those who dealt with him often struggled to figure out a way to both avoid his wrath and manipulate him toward moderation. No one in the administration did a better job than Mike Pence of understanding the moment and responding to what was required, much like the child who intuits how to mollify an unpredictable and frightening parent. Whatever his motivation, Pence would not cease to gaze and praise and back Trump’s claims no matter the facts.
Nowhere was Pence’s backing more steadfast than in the matter of Russia. In defending the president on Russia, Pence could be seen as also protecting himself. Obvious questions about Pence’s own role in the Russia story had circulated all along despite his attempts to stand at a distance and appear isolated. Pence had to know that he was not immune to fallout from the Russia probe. Within weeks of Mueller’s appointment, Pence hired Richard Cullen, a former U.S. attorney and onetime Virginia attorney general, as his criminal defense lawyer representing him in the Russia probe. Coincidentally, Cullen was a friend and colleague of James Comey, whose firing was the impetus for establishing a special prosecutor. Pence had lawyered up at least one other time in his elective career. At the end of his gubernatorial career, he was embroiled in a battle over whether emails concerning state business he sent using a private America Online account should be released to the public. Some of the emails involved Pence’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the HIV outbreak in southern Indiana, and interaction with and about then presidential candidate Trump. Pence aides said he had paid legal fees in that case from gubernatorial campaign funds. In the Russia dispute, a Pence spokesman said the legal fees might be covered by a political action committee. Pence’s own possible engagement with Russians became a subject of interest when, in September 2017, his press spokesman Marc Lotter would not answer a clear question about the subject on national television.
Bill Hemmer, an anchor on the Trump-friendly channel Fox News, asked Lotter in a live interview, “Did the vice president ever meet with representatives from Russia?” Inexplicably, Lotter did not offer a simple “no.” Instead, he said, “Uh, the vice president isn’t, is … is, is not focused on the areas where, you know, where on this campaign, especially things that happened before he was, uh, even on the ticket. As he has said, that when he joined the campaign his entire focus was on talking to the American people, taking the case that President Trump was going to make to the American people.”
Hemmer, who seemed surprised, repeated his question, saying, “Just come back to this question. If it wasn’t a private citizen from Russia, did he ever meet with representatives from the Russian government during the campaign?”7
Lotter waffled again: “You know, that stuff would be what the special prosecutor and the counsels are looking at…”
Hemmer tried one last time: “Just to nail this down, so it’s clear: Is that a yes or no? Did he or did he not, and, and was it relevant in fact?”
Lotter, hemmed in, still evaded the issue defensively: “Um, I’m not aware of anything that I have seen…”
Following that performance, rumors about Pence and Russia receded with the chaotic daily diet of news and news leaks emerging from the Trump White House. Lotter would soon leave the vice president’s office. Friends insisted that his TV performance was not the cause of his departure. However, they immediately tightened up their defense of the vice president. When the topic arose, they would say that Pence had been too busy campaigning during the run-up to the election to be aware of what was going on. Whatever Russian involvement there was, another staffer said, “it was run out of New York City.”
Much as the White House wanted to put campaign controversies aside, they continued to create crises. Beginning with Flynn and then Comey, firings and resignations came at an unprecedented rate. Press secretary Sean Spicer resigned on July 21. A week later, Reince Priebus, chief of staff, also was dumped; Anthony Scaramucci, who had replaced Spicer, lasted eleven days and left on July 31; Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, left on August 18 amid reports Trump thought Bannon was taking too much credit for the president’s own success; Sebastian Gorka, a controversial right-wing ideologue, left a week after that, partly in reaction to Bannon’s departure; security man Keith Schiller went next, followed by Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price. Eventually, more than twenty senior people would leave in the first year of the administration, a pace that far exceeded any presidency in modern times.
Some of the departures were Trump’s doing, and some came as members of his team simply reached the limit of what they could stand. Economic advisor Gary Cohn approached his breaking point in the summer of 2017, when Trump remarked “fine people” were among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Cohn, who is Jewish, faced what he later acknowledged was a “frenzy of criticism” when he did not speak out immediately. Finally, he said this: “Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK.” He remained on board with Trump when the president pushed his ban against Muslims coming to the United States. But Cohn, the former chairman of the Goldman Sachs investment bank, reached the tipping point in March 2018 and resigned when Trump called for broad import tariffs on steel and aluminum, anathema to free-trade Republicans.
The Wall Street Journal reported a 34 percent turnover of staff at the White House, compared to the previous record in the first year of an administration—17 percent in Ronald Reagan’s first year in 1981. Many more departures would come in 2018. Pence had an unusual number of departures among his own top-level staff, though none were described as firings. Among those who left was Pence’s longtime chief of staff, Josh Pitcock, who went to work as a lobbyist for the technology company Oracle.
A longtime loyalist, Pitcock had served Pence for years. His departure was a sign of a new regime taking over. He was admired by the rest of the staff for his steady, gentle demeanor and his solid focus on policy. Pitcock was replaced by Nick Ayers, a thirty-five-year-old, high-powered Republican campaign strategist who was close to David and Charles Koch. Staff members said the arrival of Ayers marked a new reality, that Pence would now graduate to a different political level. He had the connections and the “sharp elbows”—everybody used the term as his nickname—to help Pence in an arena that called for the toughest political style. It was not, however, a style that matched the Pence brand as many understood it. After Pitcock left, others followed him out the door, concerned that Pence had sold himself to ambition at the expense of ideals.
Among others who served Pence for just a brief time were the vice president’s counsel, Mark Paoletta; the associate counsel, Andrew Kossack; press secretary Lotter; and Daris Meeks, Pence’s director of domestic policy. One of the strangest departures from Pence’s staff was the resignation of Dr. Jennifer Peña, a U.S. Army physician who had complained about the comportment of the White House medical director, U.S. Navy rear admiral Ronny Jackson. Jackson had been nominated to run the Department of Veterans Affairs but withdrew amid charges of misconduct.
The vice president’s aides did their utmost to steer clear of the Trump turmoil. When they did talk, insiders denied strife in their ranks. One made a special point of saying that Ayers, the new chief of staff, was not a source of friction. “He’s great. I got along very well with him,” said this source, not willing to be identified in any way. There was a tinge of fear in the way he dismissed any problem with Ayers, a power broker who everyone knew could be a dangerous antagonist. Staffers willing to speak at all drew the line on discussing any controversy, especially questions about Trump and concerns that the chaos he created could bleed into the vice president’s office. “I don’t want to be involved with [special counsel Robert] Mueller,” said one, hastening to add that this was not to indicate there was a problem.
The touchiness raised obvious questions about Pence’s strategy for dealing with Trump. Staffers worried that they and Pence could be tainted by further revelations of wrongdoing. In this case, the vice president’s flattery of Trump and loyalty could backfire. This danger was noted by Joel Goldstein, a law professor and specialist on the vice presidency at Saint Louis University.
“All vice presidents, and not just Pence, work to develop and preserve rapport with that special constituency of one,” wrote Goldstein. The difference was that “most recent vice presidents have largely demonstrated their loyalty without seeming servile.” Pence’s behavior was risky. “It potentially undermines Pence’s credibility to hitch his star to such an unpopular and controversial president.”8
Through all the turmoil, Pence, the one person in the administration who could not be fired, did not publicly object to anything the president said or did. In the case of Charlottesville, he said, “I stand with the president,” even though one of the neo-Nazis had driven his car into the crowd and killed Heather Heyer, thirty-two, as she participated in a peaceful counterprotest. In a pastoral tone, he said, “Our hearts are in Charlottesville. Because just a few short hours ago, family and friends gathered to say farewell to a remarkable young woman, Heather Heyer, and we’ve been praying. We’ve been praying for God’s peace and comfort for her family and her friends and her loved ones.” On the same day, Heyer’s mother rejected the idea that sympathy for her would serve a purpose. “You can’t wash this one away,” said Susan Bro, “by shaking my hand and saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”
The vice president had offered his condolences during a visit to Chile, where he met with President Michelle Bachelet, and he encouraged the Chilean leader to join an international effort to isolate North Korea. President Trump was in the middle of a war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over Kim’s rapid development and testing to both nuclear weapons and rockets to deliver them. Adding trade sanctions to bellicose rhetoric—threatening “fire and fury”—that rattled the world, Trump needed someone to play good cop to his bad—or rather, crazy—cop, and Pence was the logical choice. Beginning in the summer of 2017, the vice president would be dispatched to not only reassure nations but also rally them to the American cause.
Pence seemed to enjoy moving around the world in ways that Trump did not. Notoriously committed to his habits, Trump did not like to travel abroad, and as his early performances in the Middle East and Europe would show, he wasn’t very effective in global gatherings. Images of Trump riding a golf cart while other leaders walked in Sicily and his daughter Ivanka occupying his chair at a summit in Germany sent the wrong kind of message for a president who wanted the world to see him as a vigorous man ever in command. In this atmosphere, Pence’s ability to project calm and smile benignly proved to be a reliable asset. Trump was an outsized personality who drew protests and would not hold reliably to a script prepared for him by his aides. Pence could travel with a smaller retinue and with a smaller security contingent. He could perform in a quiet way that was not possible for Trump and was also more normal in the diplomatic world.
In the meantime, Americans were tossed by the mood swings of Donald Trump, which were displayed in his Twitter comments and then dissected on cable news. Day after day, it was Trump against the Justice Department, Trump against a porn actress, Trump and his worst instincts. Then, on October 8, Trump decided to dive into a controversy involving players in the National Football League, who were making a political point about the treatment of African Americans by police by sometimes kneeling during the national anthem. True to form, Trump made the issue into a weapon in his political culture war, declaring, “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”
No one could be mistaken about the racial implications of a president who had praised neo-Nazis in Charlottesville going after athletes protesting the treatment of black men. The vice president dutifully followed a script prepared for him by attending a game in Indianapolis between the Colts and the San Francisco 49ers. Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers quarterback until 2016 who had quietly begun the kneeling protests, had found himself out of a job after it spread around the league. Trump railed against Kaepernick and any player who emulated him, and he deputized Pence to make the point. Just before the start of the game, Pence, wearing a suit jacket emblazoned with an American flag pin, stood with hand over his heart. Karen, also hand over heart, wore a blue number 18 Colts jersey, in honor of Peyton Manning, who had played in Indianapolis and whose number was being retired. After they saw that several 49ers had in fact knelt during the anthem, Pence and Karen gathered up their retinue and left the stadium.
Trump soon revealed that Pence’s stunt was preplanned, tweeting, “I asked @VP Pence to leave stadium if any players kneeled, disrespecting our country. I am proud of him and @SecondLady Karen.”
Pence’s participation in Trump’s drama cost around $250,000 in public funds. Others noted details of the staging. One reporter was warned ahead of time to avoid going into Lucas Oil Stadium, where the game was played, because Pence and Karen likely would be leaving early.
The football game stunt suggested Pence was little more than a prop in the president’s drama. Pence rarely failed to support Trump, but he would in the case of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama. Nominated to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Moore was the subject of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls. A few days before the December 12 election, Trump went down to Pensacola, Florida, the media market just a few miles from the Alabama border, and spoke for him at a big rally. “We need a Republican in the House, we need a Republican in the Senate. We need more of them,” he said.
Initially, Trump, Pence, and the Republican hierarchy saw no alternative but to support Moore, who was a shoo-in against Democrat Doug Jones. (No Alabama Democrat had represented the state in the U.S. Senate for twenty years.) However, when a series of women began providing details about their liaisons with Moore when he was a young prosecutor, many in the GOP, including Pence, refused to show support for him. Pence’s spokesperson, Alyssa Farah, said, “The vice president found the allegations in the story disturbing and believes, if true, this would disqualify anyone from serving in office.”9
When the ballots were cast, Doug Jones eked out a victory over Moore. Given GOP dominance in the state and the president’s active campaign on Moore’s behalf, Jones’s win was widely regarded as a repudiation of Trump. On January 3, 2018, Pence performed his ceremonial duty of swearing in Jones at the Capitol. News reports made much of the image of Jones’s gay son, Carson, who knew of Pence’s judgmental regard for anyone who is not heterosexual, casting a withering gaze at Pence during the ceremony.
Days after the swearing in, Mike and Karen Pence left Washington for a rescheduled Middle East trip to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. The visit had been postponed when Trump suddenly announced his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The decision sparked criticism from Democrats and many European leaders who thought it was an ill-timed, even amateurish diplomatic move. When the criticism faded, Pence embarked with the public intention of making foreign policy points in all three countries and the private goal of expressing his religious fervor in the Holy Land.