Two weeks ago, when I spoke to Anthony Scaramucci, the former White
House communications
director—the
same conversation in which he pilloried several colleagues, threatened
to fire his entire staff, and claimed to have called the F.B.I. to
investigate the White House chief of staff—he offered some cryptic
thoughts about Vice-President Mike Pence. “Why do you think Nick’s
there, bro?” Scaramucci asked me, referring to Nick Ayers, Pence’s
recently installed chief of staff. “Are you stupid?” He continued, “Why
is Nick there? Nick’s there to protect the Vice-President because the
Vice-President can’t believe what the fuck is going on.” Given
everything else Scaramucci told me that day, I left this exchange out of
my original article about the conversation. But, in light of the news
this week about Pence’s political machinations, the remarks seem worth
revisiting.

On Saturday, the Times, citing conversations with seventy-five
Republicans, reported that two of Pence’s aides, including Ayers, have
told other Republicans that the Vice-President, in the words of the
Times, “wants to be
ready”
to run for President in 2020 in case the opportunity arises.

In the complicated relationship between a President and his
Vice-President, nothing is more sensitive than a Vice-President angling
to replace the boss, and Pence’s response to the Times article was
furious. He called the piece “disgraceful and offensive to me, my
family, and our entire team” and labelled the allegations it
contained—without being specific—“categorically false.” It was
“laughable and absurd,” the Vice-President said, to think that he wasn’t
committed to Trump’s reëlection.

But what did Scaramucci mean when he told me that Pence couldn’t
“believe” what was going on? And what was he getting at when he asked me
to think about why Ayers had been hired? At the time, I took his
reference to what was “going on” to mean the general dysfunction in the
White House. But, as the Times noted over the weekend, Ayers’s
appointment was “a striking departure from vice presidents’ long history
of elevating a government veteran to be their top staff member. Mr.
Ayers had worked on many campaigns but never in the federal government.”
Was Scaramucci suggesting that Ayers was meant to protect Pence from the
fallout if and when Trump collapses politically, resigns, decides not to
run for reëlection, or is impeached? (Scaramucci did not respond to a
request for comment on Tuesday.)

This is treacherous ground for any Vice-President. During Bill Clinton’s
impeachment, Al Gore was extremely careful to avoid any activities that
might have been interpreted as supporting Clinton’s ouster. He had deep
reservations about Clinton’s personal conduct with Monica Lewinsky, but
even privately he was steadfast in his support and rarely vented about
how he felt about the President’s mistakes, lest his true feelings leak
out and inadvertently fuel the impeachment effort. “As he understood his
responsibilities, unconditional support was his only option,” John F.
Harris writes in “The Survivor,”
an account of Clinton’s Presidency.

Publicly, Pence has shown nothing but unconditional—at times even
obsequious and worshipful—support for Trump. His private actions,
however, suggest a more calculating and realistic mind-set. But would
Pence be able to survive a Trump collapse?

I reached out to Ron Klain, Gore’s chief of staff when he was
Vice-President, to ask about how Gore dealt with the complexities of
serving loyally as Vice-President for someone who might be booted out of
office. He was reluctant to compare Pence’s situation with Gore’s, but
he did, however, make it clear that any attempt by Pence to escape
Trump’s shadow would be met with a withering argument from Democrats.

“While some of what Vice-President Pence is doing differs from what his
predecessors did, I don’t find it particularly extraordinary,” Klain
told me. “Over all, I would say that whenever Mike Pence runs for office
in the future, the liability he will carry from this period is not how
he distanced himself from Trump but, rather, how he deepened his ties
to the President. In 2020, at the end of a failed, one-term Trump
Presidency, no amount of PAC money or donor meetings will insulate
Vice-President Pence from the political fallout from being Donald
Trump’s transition chief, Capitol Hill liaison, right-hand man, and
principal surrogate.” It’s a difficult logic to argue with.