Of Course, Donald Trump's Vice Presidential Announcement Was All About Trump

Did we expect any less?

Donald Trump and Mike Pence shake hands
Drew AngererGetty Images

CLEVELAND—So that was a pretty astonishing show we watched from here, the place where the Republican Party will hand itself body and soul over to He, Trump. Nine times out of 10, a presidential candidate will roll out his vice-presidential pick in the convention's host city. But, then again, nine times out of 10, a presidential candidate is not He, Trump, who adores a big room. So the event took place in the Big Apple, that Gotham we call New York, the City That Never Sleeps, and we rubes out here by the big lake could only look on in awe and wonder, while elsewhere in Cleveland, folks were making sure all the rubber stamps were well-inked and ready to go.

First of all, for approximately a half-hour, there was serious doubt as to whether Pence was in New York at all. He waited off-stage for about a half-hour while He, Trump ran through his greatest hits. The big lie about his opposition to the Iraq War. (Pence was for it.) His opposition to 25 years of international trade policies. (Pence supported all of it, right down the line.) He talked about how he had driven the party establishment before him, listening to the lamentations of their delegates. (Pence was a part of said establishment for an awfully long time.)

He once again proclaimed, at length, his greatness as demonstrated by his victories in the Republican primary process. He boasted about the beautiful, classy hotel he's building in Washington. He tossed a little shade at Ted Cruz, and at Pence himself, for having allied themselves before the Indiana primary.

Governor Pence endorsed somebody else but it was more of an endorsement for me. It was the single best un-endorsement I've ever had.

I don't know, either.

But perhaps the strangest detour in this Lost Battalion of the language was when He, Trump decided to polish the apples of the evangelical community by announcing that he was going to repeal The Johnson Amendment. This was a change in the tax code pushed through by then-Senator Lyndon Johnson that forbade members of the clergy from endorsing or attacking specific candidates on pain of losing their tax-exempt status.

(There is a legitimate historical ambivalence toward the amendment since many historians regard it as having been a weapon against political organizing among African American churches during the beginnings of the civil-rights movement. On the other hand, some historians, like James Davidson, see its original purpose as having been directed against the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950's, much of which flowed from various pulpits, many of them Catholic.)

Among religious wingnuts, this has been a cause celebre for some time now and the platform that the GOP adopted last week calls for its repeal. (Which would result in the Bible-banging equivalent of the Citizens United decision, and any repeal would get sued from hell to breakfast by about 100 different civil-liberties groups.) I don't know which one of his advisers fed him this line, but it went over very well, and I'm sure Pence, wherever he was being held backstage, applauded.

By the time he finally got around to introducing Pence, this looked less like a campaign rollout than it did a proof-of-life video to Pence's family back home (again) in Indiana. (Look, mother. Mike is still alive! Pay the ransom!) By the time he finally got around to introducing Pence, he did it in one brief sentence and then he… left… the… stage.

As for Pence's speech, it was pretty much what anyone who's watched his career expected. (However, why somebody hired Eli Roth to dark-light the stage is beyond me. Pence looked like a raccoon.) We got the humble beginnings on a farm in Zionsville, where he grew up idolizing JFK and Dr. King. We got the tagline he's been using throughout his career: "I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order." (By contrast, as long as we're talking about LBJ, he used to say that he was a free man, an American, a United States senator, and a Democrat, in that order.)

He did some perfectly adequate Hillary-bashing, but nothing you can't hear every day on your local talk-station – which, by the way, was where Mike Pence cut his political teeth. He will get better at that and, at the very least, he will stick to something resembling a script, in contrast to his running mate, who still wavers dizzily between mudslinging improv and reading things off a piece of paper that he holds up in front of his face. It's like nothing I've ever seen.

I swear I'm teetering on the edge of something I can only describe as amazement exhaustion. I never had an illusion that, just because the candidate is a clown, that the Trump campaign was anything but very serious.

We must now all accept as axiomatic that there is nothing that He, Trump can do that will derail his campaign among the people who have followed him since the campaign began. This kind of show may be what America wants to watch for the next few years. After all, there are reasons that freak shows persist. They sell. People like them.


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