Speaking of low-probability events, Trump’s literary interests were hidden until his vice presidential search took him to Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, where he found Mike Pence, whose sometimes unctuous affect resembles Uriah Heep’s: So very ’umble. The adjective “oleaginous” might have been invented to describe Pence’s performance with Trump on 60 Minutes:
Being chosen by Trump is “very, very humbling.” Trump is “one of the best negotiators in the world” and will provide “broad-shouldered American strength.” Trump — “this good man” (what would a bad man look like to Pence?) — “is awed with the American people.”
Pence, a broad-spectrum social conservative saddened by our fallen world, can minister to the boastful adulterer and aspiring torturer who Pence thinks belongs in the bully pulpit. Actually, the sole benefit of Trump’s election would be in making the presidency’s sacerdotal role — the nation’s moral tutor — terminally ludicrous.
In May, Pence endorsed Ted Cruz but larded his endorsement with lavish praise of Trump, who excuses Pence for buckling “under tremendous pressure from establishment people.” In a year of novelties, now this one: A presidential candidate calls his running mate weak.
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