Should we be preparing for President Mike Pence? The North Korean government dismissed him as a “political dummy”, and his own former Republican congressional colleagues mocked him as “Mike Dense”. But the square-jawed Christian conservative and one-time talk radio host is not only, in Adlai Stevenson’s immortal phrase, “a heartbeat from the presidency” but, perhaps, an impeachment vote away from it too.
Does Pence have his eye on the top job? A year ago, in May 2017, he became the first sitting vice-president to register his own political action committee to raise funds – and he did so on the same day Robert Mueller was given the job of investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. A coincidence? Not likely. “Mike Pence wanted to be president practically since he popped out of the womb,” Harry McCawley, a retired local newspaper editor in the vice-president’s hometown of Columbus, Indiana, told the New Yorker last October. “He’s very ambitious, even calculating, about the steps he’ll take toward that goal.”
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