Trump has a Mike Pence insurance policy: The sanctimonious veep is implicated too

[ffr]

Why don't Republicans just give up and cut Donald Trump loose? That question has been on the minds of most political observers since the beginning of Trump's presidency, and it's only grown more intense in the wake of scandal after scandal after scandal, in which the lying, cheating, grifting, thieving sleazebag who bigoted his way into the White House continues to make fools of everyone who supports and defends him.
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But there's a strong alternative explanation: Republicans have good reason to fear that if Trump goes down, he's taking Vice President Mike Pence with him. If that happens, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is third in line under the Constitution, would become president. Republicans may be genuinely worried that they can't toss Trump to the curb without losing the White House entirely.
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That might initially sound odd, since Pence's name has come up only rarely in the discussion of the Ukraine scandal. He was barely mentioned during the many hours of testimony from Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent on Wednesday. But even though that mention of Pence was brief, if one reads between the lines a bit, it was also illuminating.

In his opening statement, Taylor said that on Sept. 1, Trump suddenly canceled a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming Hurrican Dorian as an excuse. (In reality, Trump played golf.) In his stead, Trump sent Pence. Taylor, who received a readout of the meeting, says that Zelensky asked right away about the military aid that Trump was withholding — aid that Trump was clearly using as leverage to extort Zelensky to back up Trump's conspiracy theory about his presumed Democratic 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Pence "did not respond substantively," Taylor recounted, but did say that Trump "wanted the Ukrainians to do more to fight corruption."

To the average observer, that language sounds bland and unimportant. But those who have been following this scandal closely know that "fighting corruption" was Trump's code phrase for opening up phony investigations to damage his political enemies and bolster right-wing conspiracy theories." We know Trump doesn't actually want to fight corruption, because his actual behavior and associations in Ukraine indicates a general pro-corruption point of view — and also because of common sense. We also know that while Pence might not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer, he is probably smart enough to know that "fighting corruption" was Trumpian code for "do this corrupt thing for me, or else."
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While the average viewer might not pick up these implications, Republicans in Congress watching the proceedings certainly would. Knowing that Pence toed the Trumpian line by responding to requests for aid with coded language about "fighting corruption" — language we know Zelensky understood, at this point, to mean "spread conspiracy theories about Biden" — means that Pence is implicated. - Salon

That's what we've been saying for over a month already. Pence is in some deep crapola!

[OnDoutside]

1. Even by hanging on to this, there will come a point where they

do terminal damage by waiting too long. Whatever about Trump, it's all about bringing down the numbers, as McCarthy would say.