It was a weird weekend for the newly elected president and vice president, and I'm sure by now you know the story well: On Friday night, Mike Pence went to Hamilton. It didn’t go that well. Donald Trump commented on the matter on Saturday with a blustering, harrumph-y tweet. That went about as well as it usually does. And on Sunday, Mike Pence went on Fox News Sunday. As Jack Moore wrote, Pence “reminded us of how a normal politician would have responded to this non-story”—which is to say, by being pretty darn nice about it. And that's when one of the scariest scenes of the nascent Trump administration took place.
They're trying to draw this thing out as long as possible.
On the talk show, Pence said he wasn’t offended by the booing from the audience at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York, that he recognized it was an anxious time for many Americans whose chosen candidate hadn’t won the national election. And perhaps most poignantly, he said that when he’d heard the audience booing at him, “I nudged my kids and reminded them that that's what freedom sounds like.”
That’s what freedom sounds like. Damn, Mike Pence. So smooth.
It’s not surprising that Pence is a good talker; after all, before going into politics, he was a conservative radio host. But in this climate, a member of the Trump administration recognizing expressions of dissent as a natural, normal phenomenon of the American experiment feels oddly out of step with the rhetoric we've been processing from the incoming administration. Here, Pence comes off looking like the cool dad who recognized that the stuff you accidentally left on the family computer’s browser history was a natural, normal phenomenon of teenage guyhood, and not something your mom needed to know about.
Of course, as Jack writes, these are all very welcome sentiments until you consider that they're “coming from a guy who believes in conversion therapy for gay people. And from an incoming administration that embraced xenophobia, racism, and sexism throughout their run for the White House.” And therein lies the real danger of Mike Pence. He represents the same harmful, hateful policies as Donald Trump, only unlike his boss, he actually does have “the best words.” Pence has a keen sense of when and where to say gracious, conciliatory things that catch his opponents off guard; he can be magnanimous and unifying where Trump is petty and alienating. It's a studied contrast, and he obscures a whole platform of intolerant views with language that’s surprisingly hard to argue with—and often stirringly sincere.
Remember Pence, unprompted, telling an on-the-offensive Tim Kaine at the vice presidential debate that he had “a great deal of respect for Senator Kaine's sincere faith, I truly do,” wrong-footing Kaine into a somewhat startled “That’s shared”? Remember when Pence later offered a disarming chuckle while reaching warmly toward an agitated Kaine, saying, “At the risk of agreeing with you, community policing is a great idea”? For all the talk of the media's "normalization" of the Trump presidency, the real agent of normalization could well be Pence. There's a knee-jerk repulsiveness, both at surface and substantive levels, to Trump himself spewing out hateful word salads of bigotry—but until I remember just how often he's voted against the humanity and dignity of large swaths of Americans, I find it incredibly hard to dislike Mike Pence.
What’s particularly alarming, too, is that Pence manages to stand for some of the most blatant, backward-thinking intolerance we’ve seen in generations while sounding like one of Aaron Sorkin's Good Republicans™—conservative characters literally engineered to humanize the "enemy" for liberal-leaning audiences. When Pence is at his most placating, it’s hard not to hear a little bit of Arnold Vinick, Alan Alda’s charismatic West Wing Republican whose apparent benevolence across the aisle stole votes from the protagonists' Democratic base, in his words. For the next four to eight years, Mike Pence could be the silver-tongued secret weapon of the Trump administration.
Of course, these kill-’em-with-kindness, high-road moments pop up more often in politically mixed company—that is, when the administration's opponents are around to witness them. He knows exactly when to deploy these soothing, appeasing sentiments. Which, ironically, makes Pence a perfect example of a “politician” in the derogatory sense of the word—the same kind of swamp creature Trump promised voters he'd get rid of.