Pence’s elevation put him in the public spotlight in a sustained way for the first time since he took office as the nation’s forty-eighth vice president. For the preceding three years, he had been the invisible man with the frozen smile, noticed only when he stood silently behind the president, “mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan,” as Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker.[28] Republicans on Capitol Hill nicknamed him “the Bobblehead” for his ritual nodding whenever Trump spoke.[29] Pence was no more revealing in private. Senior administration officials could
...more
