Welcome to the Shadow Presidency of Mike Pence

Donald Trump was notoriously loathe to buckle down and prepare for his debates with Hilary Clinton. It was evident in his garbled replies and stream of consciousness riffs in his replies to seemingly straightforward questions from moderators. Here’s a sample:

Trump on Social Security:

“If you listen to the Democrats, they want to do many things to Social Security and I want to do them on its own merit. You listen to them, what they want to do to Social Security, none of these folks are getting elected, OK, whether they can do it or not. I’m going to save Social Security. I’m going to bring jobs back from China.”

Trump on Aleppo:

“Well, Aleppo is a disaster. It’s a humanitarian nightmare. But it has fallen from the — from any standpoint. I mean, what do you need, a signed document? Take a look at Aleppo. It is so sad when you see what’s happened. And a lot of this is because of Hillary Clinton, because what’s happened is, by fighting Assad, who turned out to be a lot tougher than she thought, and now she’s going to say, oh, he loves Assad, she’s — he’s just much tougher and much smarter than her and Obama.”

Trump on cyber warfare :

“I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly do-able. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester and certainly cyber is one of them.”

Trump’s “Art of the Deal” ghost writer, Tony Schwartz, in his New Yorker interview, said that he had been startled by his client’s short attention span. During their first interview, Mr. Trump endured just a few minutes of Mr. Schwartz’s questions before leaping up from his chair and declaring the entire exercise a waste of his time.

“He couldn’t tolerate doing interviews,” he tells me. “He just couldn’t stay focused for more than a few minutes at a time. And think about this, Michael, it was when he was talking about himself, which is his favorite subject.”

Frank Bruni, of the New York Times, said “I think of Trump as a toddler sitting in a high chair. And his advisers are saying ‘Donald, you must get through the meal without throwing your spaghetti on the wall.’”

Trump has embarrassed himself repeatedly by displaying a stunning lack of knowledge, or even curiosity, about the nuts and bolts of the job of President. He did not know what Hugh Hewitt was talking about when asked about the Nuclear Triad. And after his first foreign policy briefing, it was revealed that he asked three times why if we had nuclear weapons, could we not use them (pre-emptively, presumably).

During the Republican primaries, it was reported that his camp approached an adviser to John Kasich with an offer to make him the most powerful Vice President in history. The adviser said that Donald Trump Jr. offered Kasich a place on the ticket, and noted that his father’s running mate would be in charge of both domestic and foreign policy, according to the Times. When the adviser asked what that would leave for President Trump, Donald Jr. reportedly replied, “Making America great again.”

Kasich declined the offer, but it seems that Mike Pence was more than willing to become the new Dick Cheney.

Trump has shown, repeatedly, that he is no policy wonk; nor is he interested, or even capable of putting in the work that is required of the position. He likes the idea of being called Mr. President far more than actually being the President, with all its responsibilities and the intellectual and moral weight that entails. To his own great surprise, he has succeeded in the ultimate con, and the reality of it must just now be dawning on him.

He will spend the next four years tweeting at 3am, making enemy lists, and basking in the world’s attention, positive or negative, while delegating the presidential responsibilities to a coterie of yes men headed by Pence and his Three Amigos – Gingrich, Giuliani and Christie (although given Christie’s fall from grace, he may just be relegated to midnight runs to Burger King.)

Nero had his fiddle. Trump has his twitter account. The results, for civilization, may well be the same.