Mike Pence: Donald Trump’s pick for vice president

Donald Trump’s running mate Mike Pence will take the debate stage Tuesday night and square off against Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine.

But, you might wonder, who is Mike Pence, anyway?

It’s no secret that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate, opposes abortion rights. Pence basically invented the Republican Party’s war on Planned Parenthood while he was in Congress. He wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned. He signed every anti-abortion bill that crossed his desk as governor of Indiana.

But Pence signed one anti-abortion bill in March of this year that was so extreme, even some pro-life Republicans opposed it. And it was eventually blocked from going into effect by a federal judge for violating women’s right to choose.

Donald Trump’s opposition to same-sex marriage and casual bigotry never made him a favorite among LGBTQ voters, but one of his biggest campaign decisions sealed the deal: By picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Trump’s Republican ticket is absolutely the anti-LGBTQ ticket.

To understand why, you have to go back to early 2015. Back then, Pence, as governor of Indiana, signed a religious freedom bill into law. It was never clear if the bill would actually allow discrimination against LGBTQ people, but both proponents and critics of the measure said it would — specifically, they claimed the bill would allow businesses to ignore local nondiscrimination laws and discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Donald Trump — the Republican presidential nominee known for coining the monikers “Crooked Hillary Clinton,” “low-energy Jeb Bush,” “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “Little Marco Rubio” for his rivals — has picked a running mate who doesn’t believe “name-calling has any place in public life.”

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, said it was “unfortunate” that President Barack Obama called Trump a demagogue during his Democratic National Convention speech, on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday morning.

When Donald Trump announced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, it was widely seen as an uncharacteristically establishment pick for a presidential candidate known for bombastic — and often wildly inaccurate — statements.

Pence is a seasoned politician — a governor and former US representative who had served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — and thus had the potential to bring some order, and maybe some policy rigor, to Trump’s unconventional and often vague political positions.

I do not know how to explain what I just watched.

It should be easy. Donald Trump introduced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. There it is. One sentence. Eleven words. But that doesn’t explain what happened any better than “I spent a few hours letting lysergic acid diethylamide mimic serotonin in my brain” explains an acid trip. What just happened was weird, and it was important.

Donald Trump formally introduced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate Saturday with a speech in New York City that was a testament to Trump’s greatest strength: talking about himself.

The two shared the stage for the first time as a joint ticket, as the presumptive Republican nominee weaved in and out of his usual self-aggrandizing campaign stump speech — plus a bizarrely long and confusing anecdote about evangelical voters and a 1954 tax code that prevents tax-exempt organizations from endorsing political candidates — to tout Pence’s record in Indiana.

A key job of the president is to choose the chair and other key officials of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. The Fed is way more powerful than most people realize: If the Fed raises interest rates at the wrong time, it can trigger a recession that can destroy a president’s career. (George H.W. Bush blamed his 1992 loss on Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, for example.)

Since 2008, there’s been an important debate about whether the Fed has been doing too much or too little to support the economy. Many economists believe that the Fed’s quick action in late 2008 saved the country from a more severe economic downturn. But critics, including many conservatives, argue that low interest rates between 2008 and 2015 have been counterproductive.

The Donald Trump–Mike Pence ticket has a logo, and it is ... not safe for work?

Shortly after Trump announced the Indiana governor as his running mate, the Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising email with a new Trump-Pence letterhead. The logo: A Trump “T” penetrating a Pence “P” to form some kind of distorted American flag. See for yourself:

I’ve written some mean things about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the years, and now that he’s in the national spotlight as the Republican vice presidential candidate, the time has come to tell the truth: I owe him an apology.

I spent years slagging Pence as stupid and moronic simply because he was a leading member of Congress participating in a major debate over a public policy issue that he didn’t understand at all. At the time, it struck me as genuinely shocking. And I responded in the way that a shocked person responds — emotionally, and with some overstatement.

Donald Trump is all about winning. He tells us all the time. Trump doesn’t worry about little things like politeness, personal attacks, or accuracy in campaigning. He is trying to win: for himself, and for America.

You would think he would pick a vice presidential nominee who shared his insatiable, decades-long thirst to win. But you would be wrong.

Back in 2014, Matt Yglesias predicted that Mike Pence would be the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nominee.

When I first heard the pitch, I was dismissive. But Matt’s case was convincing. Pence, he argued, was “generic Republican” come to life. He was like every other Republican, but a bit more so, and a bit better liked. In the House, he led the conservative Republican Study Committee and then was elected to GOP leadership. As governor of Indiana, his fellow Republican governors named him to the Executive Committee of the Republican Governors Association. As Politico’s Mike Allen wrote, Pence could “bridge the establishment/business and evangelical/tea party wings of the GOP.”

Donald Trump is set to make his VP announcement on Friday, and there’s increasing buzz that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence could be the pick. A New York Times report cites three anonymous sources who say that Trump’s advisers have told Republican officials “that they are preparing to make an announcement” with Pence, and IndyStar and Roll Call have both reported that Pence is the pick. The Times reporters’ sources, however caution that Trump could still change his mind, and two Trump aides have tweeted that no decision has yet been made.

If Pence does turn out to be the pick, though, he would be in some ways an almost shockingly banal choice for Trump — a former Congress member turned governor of a midsize state who didn’t intervene in the primary in any kind of noteworthy way.

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton expected to announce their vice presidential nominees in the next week or two, the media is frantically speculating about whether their picks will help — or hurt — their electoral prospects.

Will Trump try to shore up his support among evangelical conservatives? Or will he pick an “attack dog” who will tear into Clinton? Will Clinton want a progressive firebrand to win over Bernie Sanders die-hards? Or will she attempt to cut into Trump’s big lead among white men?

With Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in the news due to his state’s controversial religious freedom law, BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski has been digging around Pence’s old campaign websites. Today, he found this old article in which Pence grapples with the immense box office success of the film Titanic — and concludes that Americans love it because the titular ship’s sinking is a metaphor for the US turning away from traditional values.

After considering several possible explanations for the film’s popularity, including its “breathtaking” cinematography and “powerful” story, Pence concludes that “something else is going on here.”