Thread by @AlexandraErin

So here's a thing about Mike Pence, friends and neighbors.

A lot of people, going into this, assumed that Pence accepted the VP seat with an expectation that he'd become president. There were many confident assertions that this was "the plan" for the GOP.

The notion was they would use Donald to get what they want and then pressure him to resign or impeach him or have him be arrested, then move Pence in.

This made sense to a lot of people, but never to me.

The thing it did for folks was it answered the question "why is the GOP going along with this farce?", but it actually didn't. It just kicked that can down the road where it was easier to ignore.

If Donald was more amenable to giving "them" what they wanted, there was no reason to remove him and put Pence in. If he wasn't, there was no reason to back him. Marginal gains in stability from the changeover wouldn't be worth destabilizing the GOP electorate with a palace coup.

Closely related to this was the argument to the leftward side, which was that we shouldn't try to remove Trump "because then we'll have Pence" -- as if we didn't already have Pence.

Maybe Pence did take the VPship with a hope of being president. Many do. And maybe he thought he had slightly better than average odds of sliding into the top spot, when you add everything up.

But there's a bit of a paradox at play here.

We have to consider that the vice presidency was not designed to be the president's lieutenant. The original purpose of the office was to have a spare, because life is horrible and people are fragile. Ceremonial duties in the Senate to keep the sucker around. That's it.

There was no conception, when the job was created, that the vice president would be a member of the president's party, because everybody had their fingers crossed behind their backs when George Washington asked, "Just so we're clear, we're not doing the party thing, right?"

At the founding of the country, the vice president was literally just the runner up for president. The electoral college's second choice.

But it didn't take long for both sides of the political spectrum of the day to realize that was untenable for the parties they totally, in fact, had. They immediately started strategizing their votes to make sure the winner could also pick the VP, and eventually formailzed that.

So right away, when you've got the president picking the vice president... okay, it might sound like this is a situation where the VP would almost always be the hand-picked successor, but you know how rare it is for a former VP to win election to the presidency?

And succession in office... okay, so, the office of Roman Emperor, to the extent that it actually existed as a formal office, was not actually hereditary. No law of primogeniture. It smacked of kings and crowns, which Romans officially *hated*.

And most Roman emperors were very cagey about naming their successors at any moment before they were ready to die. Like they would prop up and groom their favorites but as soon as you say "When I die, my adopted ward Patrocidus will rule."... you're creating some incentives.

I daresay most US presidents have not actually felt the need to watch their backs for knives from their veeps, but Donald Trump is an extraordinarily weak and fearful person when it comes to this kind of thing.

So even if Pence hopes to become president, in order to become vice president and remain vice president, he has had to prove himself again and again, double down and redouble on his loyalty, make ostentatious shows of fealty, over and over again.

Call it the Pence Paradox - a man a lot of people pinned their hopes on checking Trump, being Trump's successor, being the "real president" after Donald Trojan Horse'd him into the White House, can't be in a position to do that unless he renders himself incapable of doing it.

And there were definitely mainstream Republicans (meaning, more genteel and covert in holding the same views as Trumpian Republicans) who were hoping that either formally or informally they could get Pence calling the shots, and people in the mild moderate middle hoping, too.

So now let's talk about Nikki Haley, whose "Not Under Consideration For The Vice Presidency" t-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the shirt.

The wild thing about the rumors that she has been emphatically denying is they neatly replace the previous rumors about her, which is that she had left her post in the Trump regime to position herself for a primary challenge against him.

Now, at the time, I said I didn't think she was mounting a challenge but that everything she did and said was to try to get one foot on each of two different positions that might crumble, so she could shift her weight at a moment's notice.

If Trump held on, she didn't want to lose all his goodwill. If it became apparent that he was very likely to lose anyway, she would be ready to step up, whether as a primary challenger or a savior of the party after his loss.

If we assume for the moment that, t-shirt notwithstanding, there is some truth to the rumors that Trump is considering dumping Pence for Haley, you might well wonder why a man who demands absolute loyalty would want to move someone so calculating and self-serving to that spot.

And the answer is, to neutralize her. It's not even "keep your enemies closer" in the way that most people mean it. Trump operates, as I said earlier in the week, on the principle of constant, constant self-reinforcing loyalty tests.

Definitely a factor! One constant of the women in his orbit is they brag about having "open door privileges" meaning they can just walk in and interrupt him without announcement or invitation - he'd never tolerate that from a man under him.

https://twitter.com/SabrinaSpiher/status/1170009583663890433

In a final analysis, it barely matters if Trump does pick Haley or Pence, because as long as they both think she's in the running for his job, they will both be on their best behavior, both do whatever they can to preserve their standing in his eyes.

Trump loves the power of being able to fire someone, but his ideal state is to leave everybody in fearful uncertainty... never actually having to fire someone (which can reflect badly on him, as if he'd admitted a mistake, or turn into a confrontation he could lose)...

...but having everybody feeling like at any moment they might lose everything, like he could just wave his hand and destroy them.

He got a lot of things he wanted out of Sessions during the age of endless "sources say Sessions will be fired Friday" stories.

Do I think Haley will wind up on the ticket? I don't know, I'm not an oracle and I'm not super big on predictions. I rate it a more likely outcome than Trump being dumped from the ticke.

I know there's a couple of people who have been rather vocal in predicting the GOP will be forced to remove Trump from the ticket, and I can't say I fault their reasoning, I just disagree with their conclusion. I believe the GOP will weigh the cost to their party unity over all.

It doesn't matter how bad Trump gets or how bad things get for Trump, he has made sure that he owns his base heart and soul and they will ignore or excuse anything. They believed that covfefe, toilet paper on a shoe, and struggling to drink a bottle of water were coded signals.

So you've got a base that will fracture if Trump isn't in the top spot, but a lot of other people increasingly restless and uncertain. How do you calm them? The same way you did the first time around: put someone they can believe in as the VP pick.

Can't be Pence. He's useless.

No one who believed Pence was capable of propping Trump up or reining him in or stepping into his shoes the first time around is going to believe that after watching him humble himself in Ireland and so many other ways. So they need a new figure to pin those hopes on.

Again, I'm not saying it *will* happen. I don't do prophecy, friends and neighbors. But it suits Trump's purposes to dangle it like a pinata of Damocles, it would suit the GOP's needs... heck, Trump at his best runs better on change than on business as usual.

And while it's not a prediction... please do not pin your hopes for 2020 on Trump not running. If the GOP think he's completely breaking down mentally and physically, the move that will make the most sense to them is: run Trump, hope he dies or steps down soon after winning.

It's the exact same gamble a lot of GOP made in 2016.

And the basic problem with any "plan" that involves Trump leaving office is that's not a plan, that's a hope. A wish.

But Trump's Republican Party has a better chance of getting his corpse elected if he drops dead before next November than they have of winning without him.

That's what I think about the possible permutations of the GOP presidential ticket.

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