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Thank you, Mr. President, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted July 15, celebrating the one-year anniversary of candidate Donald Trump naming him to the 2016 ticket. Will ex-president Trump get to say the same thing to Pence when the new president pardons him?

Despite the I love it salivated by Donald Trump Jr. at the prospect of Kremlin help with the campaign, his fathers impeachment is a long shot. Unless Democrats retake Congress in 2018, the chance that elected Republicans will admit theyve been enabling a liar and an idiotwords that polled AmericanscallTrumpare just about nil. But I give even odds to Trumps resigning for health reasons.

Hell never admit to any of the crimes that congressional committees or special counsel Robert Mueller may fillet him for, and even if he fires Mueller, no amount of incriminating evidence uncovered by investigative journalists will awaken our man-baby-in-chief to grownup skills like telling true from false, reality from delusion and news from Fox News.

But bullies like Trump are cowards at heart. However appealing he finds sliming his prosecutors like a stressedhagfish, the thought of running away to spend more time with his 9-iron might prove irresistible. Would Pence trade the Oval Office for Trumps holding his resignation hostage to a pardon?

Pence could use the same reason Gerald Fordgavefor pardoning Richard Nixon in 1974: To write the ending of a nightmarish chapter in our history. When Ford lost the 1976 presidential election, he believed it was the pardon that doomed him, and most historians agree. You can imagine Pence wondering the same thing about his own fate in 2020.

Pence, though, may not have a choice. Trump has the goods on him.

Trump knows Pence lied when he claimed to be in the dark about the footsie former national security adviser Mike Flynn was playing with the Russians, the Turks and who knows who else. Trump also knows Pence knew how deep in the tank were Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Trump Jr. (and Ivanka? Steve Bannon? Bueller?) with Russian hackers, oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. As Trump might put it, many people aresayingthat Pence is either lying or wildly incompetent, or either a sucker and a dupe or a liar. Trump knows its all of the above, leaving Pence no alternative to paying the ransom of a pardon.

I have to believe that Pences political rise,like Sarah Palins, has been powered at least in part by his looks. If Pence, a right-wing talk radio host for an Indiana station, had looked like Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones, he might never have made it to Congress. In the 2016 vice presidential debate, Penceliedthrough his teeth, claiming Trump never uttered the falsehoods Tim Kaine quoted. If Pence didnt look like central castings idea of Midwestern rectitude, he would have been laughed off the stage.

In May, at the U.S. Naval Academy graduation, Pencesaidthe most important quality of leadership is humility, a point hemadeagain July 12 to high school students attending the National Student Leadership Conference at American University, where he went on, with no irony, to cite Donald Trump as a paragon of that very humility. Really. He actually said that. He invoked Trump to illustrate other leadership virtues, too: integrity (!), self-control (!!) and respect for authority (?). How did Pence get away with it? Tonsorial integrity, Id venturethe proxy for honesty that his headful of snowy white hair absurdly confers on the blatant bull that comes out of his mouth.

Pences current priority, selling Mitch McConnells health care bill to wavering senators, isnt going very well. The damage he did to his credibility by lying about Flynn, Russia andwhyTrump fired FBI director James Comey is ananvilaround his neck. His approval ratings, atplus-11as recently as March, have fallen, like Trumps, toall-time lows. No wonder he bombed at the National Governors Associations meeting on July 14. When he lied about Medicaid (he said its expansion under the Affordable Care Act hurt developmentally disabled Americans and put far too many able-bodied adults on the program), he wasnailednot by a Democrat, but by the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich. Pence also scored zero points with three other Republican governors whose states expanded Medicaid: Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas. When Republican senators from those states vote on McConnells bill, theyll take their lead from their governors, not from Pence.

If youre dreaming of an abbreviated Trump administration, you need to reconcile yourself not only to a Pence presidency, but also to a Pence pardon. That would make Trump even more insufferable, but as many people are saying, at least Pence would be a normal Republican. You know, the garde-variety Republican whowantsto kill Planned Parenthood and end gay marriage, who calls global warming a myth and longs for the day that Roe v. Wade is sent to the ash heap of history.

We have to keep reminding ourselves not to get used to Trump, that hes not normal. Pence may be normal, but so is poison ivy.

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Will Mike Pence Pardon Donald Trump? - AlterNet