Trump’s inside man

Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He ran for president as a kind of anti-politician, ignoring the conventional wisdom about how to win. Amazingly, he won. It was, in its way, an impressive feat, overturning much conventional wisdom. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that, as president, he’s got to be political and must surround himself with politicians. Mike Pence, his vice-president, may turn out to be the most important of the lot.

The two men did not previously know one another, but have become friends over the past five months, and recognise each other’s merits. They are a study in opposites. Trump is larger-than-life, tempestuous, never boring; Pence is mild, methodical, steady and a trifle dull. Pence is a ‘Tea Party’ critic of politics-as-usual, but by comparison with the new chief he looks like an insider. Even if Trump’s team dismantle parts of the immense federal government, as they intend, they’ve still got to know how to manoeuvre in the Washington labyrinth. Pence knows his way around.

In last week’s jostling for power, he clearly came out ahead of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. Trump almost selected Christie as his running mate back in July, before settling for Pence. He gave Christie the consolation prize of organising the transition, at a time when hardly anyone thought there would be a transition. Now that the impossible has happened, Trump has taken the suddenly significant job out of Christie’s hands and given it to Pence.

Trump may well believe, along with nearly everyone, that Christie was to blame for ‘Bridgegate’, the deliberate creation of paralysing traffic jams on one of the major bridges from New Jersey to New York to punish a Democratic town mayor who refused to endorse Christie for governor in 2013.