Mike Pence is never going to be president

The milquetoast vice president is the Republican Party's past, not its future

Mike Pence.

Who does Michael Pence think he is, exactly? The vice president and former governor of Indiana is many things: a loving husband and father, a classic specimen of Hoosier manners. But our next president? Not unless his running mate is Tom Brady.

Pence is almost uniquely unqualified to succeed Donald Trump (or a Democrat, though this possibility still seems to me remote) in 2025. The man is a fossil of the conservative movement as it existed before Trump, in what might as well be the Pleistocene era. Has he ever given anyone the impression, from before he accepted the vice presidential nomination in 2016 until the present, of being committed to a single one of the issues over which Trump broke? He is a lifelong free trader who supported the Iraq War when he was in Congress. To continue the evolutionary metaphor, Pence's following Trump would be like if the the creature after the Neanderthal in those old "March of Progress" illustrations became a gibbering monkey again. Pence belongs to the Republican Party's past, not its future.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.