Let’s dispense with the preliminaries: Tim Kaine was no untouchable golden boy during last night’s VP debate. Not even close. He fumbled statements about Iraq. He interrupted both Pence and the moderator—though Pence did his fair share of interrupting as well. At times he even seemed a bit strident. (If it had been Hillary, you’d see the word “shrill” thrown around, because female. But we’ll stick with “strident.”)
But I understand. Kaine, along with the rest of the American public, was being gaslighted, and much like any other form of bullying or manipulation, if you aren’t used to it, if you can’t see it, it can be nearly impossible to react appropriately. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, gaslighting is a form of manipulation in which one person tries to rewrite another’s reality.
And that’s precisely what Pence was doing.
By dodging questions and accusations about his running mate’s stances, occasionally strategically backing him up against all logic and reason, and outright lying about the things Trump has said, Pence was attempting to create a new reality, one in which Donald Trump and Mike Pence are a sane and rational choice for president and vice president of this nation. I’m not going to post an exhaustive list of examples, but here are a few, along with links to reality checks.
- Pence denied that Trump has praised murderous dictator Vladimir Putin. That was a lie.
- Pence called Kaine’s assertion that Trump wants to restrict Muslims from entering the country “absolutely false.” Um. Yeah, no. Trump actually put that in a press release.
- Kaine brought up Trump’s proposed deportation force, and Pence called that “nonsense.” Well, yes, a deportation force is nonsense, but the claim that Trump said it is completely true.
Like I said, these are just a few examples of Pence’s attempts to rewrite our country’s reality. Kaine was merely exhibiting the first stage of the typical reaction to gaslighting, where the victim knows what the abuser is saying is ridiculous but argues anyway.
Why would Pence do this? There are a number of possibilities, none of which are mutually exclusive.
The first possibility is that he simply could not figure out a way to back up Trump’s batshit crazy positions and still sound like a sane person himself. There, honestly, he had a bit of my sympathy. Until, that is, I remembered that no one forced him to become Trump’s running mate.
The second possibility is that he was trying to make the entire ticket seem more rational to sway more moderate Republicans into voting for him. Any moderate Republicans who fall for that are idiots, but that doesn’t mean such a strategy would not work.
The third possibility is that Pence simply has fallen in line with Trump’s unworkable positions and would thus look on in silence in the White House as Trump wreaked as much havoc as possible. On one hand, this seems unlikely—Pence is a right bastard, but he’s no milquetoast—but on the other hand, I can see him looking the other way on nearly every other issue as long as Trump helps him gain unconstitutional control of women’s uteruses everywhere as he rolls back abortion rights.
The fourth and final possibility is that Pence knows that a Trump presidency is at this point unlikely, and he’s positioning himself for a 2020 run on the Republican ticket, at which time he will deny any culpability or even knowledge of Trump’s awfulness. The sad part is that he’d probably get away with it.
Many news outlets are reporting that Pence won the debate last night. Style over substance, as they say. Well, yeah. Manipulators tend to be smooth bastards. Often we don’t see them for who they are until it’s too late.
Image credit: Flickr by user DonkeyHotey under a Creative Commons license.
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