Pence prepares to defend coronavirus response with own legacy on the line
When the White House coronavirus task force met virtually under Vice President Mike Pence’s leadership on Saturday, the group of scientists, generals and government experts were asked to take part in a prayer for President Donald Trump’s health. But the president’s personal battle with COVID-19 was not on the official agenda.
The task force is now a fixture of Pence’s legacy. It has worked for over eight months to build trust in the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic — an effort made more difficult as the nation’s death toll has reached nearly 211,000, and as a maskless Trump, reentering a White House in crisis, told the country Monday that the coronavirus is nothing to fear.
Pence will be put on the spot Wednesday night to defend a president who has repeatedly rebuked the advice of his task force aides and has led their campaign into the final stretch of the 2020 election with record disapproval of their leadership on the pandemic.
His own legacy on the line, Pence prepared with aides for over a week for an onslaught of questions about his role as the head of the task force responsible for the White House response to the pandemic when he faces Sen. Kamala Harris at the vice presidential debate in Utah.
But Pence will now also be in the position of defending the administration from criticism over its response to the pandemic after a coronavirus outbreak at the White House reached the highest levels of government and left members of the president’s staff in quarantine after testing positive.
The vice president will be the most senior administration official to be confronted with sustained questioning on a public stage since the White House crisis began with the revelation late last week that Trump had been diagnosed with COVID-19.
Pence is widely considered a likely 2024 contender. But people who know the former Indiana governor and lawmaker said he is loyal to Trump and would not try to sacrifice him to protect his own political future.
“The vice president is fully committed to making sure that the president is reelected for four more years and you see him out there every day making the case to voters in the swing states. And he will continue to do that and have a very robust campaign schedule planned post debate and moving forward,” a senior Trump campaign official who is close to the vice president said.
Club for Growth president David McIntosh, who preceded Pence as the representative for Indiana’s second congressional district, said the vice president is more likely to play up his own accomplishments as leader of the coronavirus task force than put distance between himself and the president in the debate.
“It’s not in his nature to do that, and politically, it’s not good to do that. You don’t want to show divisions a month out from the election. I would be very certain that won’t happen,” McIntosh said.
Pence delivered a brief televised statement to the press on Monday afternoon to say that he had spoken to Trump. He declined to take reporters’ questions and immediately boarded the plane with his family for the flight to Salt Lake City, where the vice presidential debate is taking place.
“When the president told me that he was headed back to the White House, he told me to go to Utah,” Pence said. “The stakes in this election have never been higher. The choice has never been clearer.”
The debate comes as a record number of Americans disapprove of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. A new poll conducted by CNN released on Monday found that 60% of Americans — a record high — disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, the most important issue to voters in the 2020 campaign.
Even the top infectious disease doctor on Pence’s coronavirus task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is publicly dissatisfied with the state of the national outbreak.
Zac Petkanas, a former senior advisor to Hillary Clinton and the current war room director for Protect Our Care — a progressive group fighting Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act — said that Pence cannot sever his record from Trump’s when it comes to the coronavirus.
“Donald Trump and Mike Pence are tied together with a coronavirus-infected cord of steel,” Petkanas said. “Mike Pence has shown at every opportunity that he is willing to carry the president’s water, and say ‘yes sir,’ and ‘no sir,’ never standing up to Donald Trump when he had the opportunity to do so. And so he owns these policies and is going to have to answer for them.”
WHITE HOUSE CHAOS
Pence is traveling to Arizona and Nevada for campaign events after the debate. He will vote early in his home state of Indiana on Friday before he goes on a bus tour of Florida that begins in the Orlando area.
“The president is healthy and making decisions. We’ll pick up some additional travel, but I think our focus right now is on Wednesday, making sure that we’re able to give a clear contrast between visions of the future of our country,” the vice president’s chief of staff Marc Short told reporters at Pence’s departure for Utah.
Trump’s diagnosis had put additional pressure on Pence in the days leading up to the debate.
The vice president stayed home as the White House outbreak became apparent over the weekend — “out of an abundance of caution,” his physician said in a letter released on Tuesday, stating he had no need to quarantine.
He has participated in several campaign calls, led Saturday’s coronavirus task force meeting and participated in the president’s national security briefing, in addition to preparing for the debate.
The vice president’s office has not had anyone test positive for the coronavirus amid the current outbreak in the West Wing. He and members of his staff attended the White House event for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee which may have been a superspreader gathering — but they work out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.
“We began encouraging staff to not come into the building unless it was essential late Thursday night after we got the president’s diagnosis,” Short said. “We wanted to make sure that our staff was protected and following the right protocols, as well.”
The vice president now faces potential questions in the debate about the president’s health and fitness and how Trump responded after learning that a senior aide had tested positive.
“Pence, who is a very skilled debater, is going in with a very weak hand to play,” Republican Voters Against Trump founder Sarah Longwell said.
“All of the irresponsibility that the president has demonstrated both leading up to the virus and then in terms of him getting the virus himself, Mike Pence is going to have to answer for,” she said. “And if we know one thing about Kamala Harris, it’s that she is not going to miss the opportunity to prosecute that particular case against him.”
McIntosh said that Pence needs to reassure suburban and college-educated Republicans who are unhappy with the president’s style and refocus the debate on Joe Biden and his qualifications for office.
He predicted that Pence would lean in to the imperative to make the election a clear choice between the two presidential candidates’ policy proposals.
“When they succeed in making it a choice, Trump can win. When it becomes a referendum on his personality, consistently he’s had trouble with that,” McIntosh said. “That’s not working for us, so they need to switch it to a choice about vision for the country.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Pence prepares to defend coronavirus response with own legacy on the line."
