Vice President Mike Pence is facing a very difficult situation, as Donald Trump implodes, and as his prospects of staying in office for the next three years and eight months becomes more difficult to accomplish. Mike Pence, by agreeing to run for Vice President, became tied to the fate of Donald Trump, and one could argue that he signed a pact with the devil. He could, ultimately, benefit, by becoming the 46th President of the United States, but let’s not jump to that conclusion quite yet.
In the midst of the Trump crisis of leadership, Mike Pence himself is coming under a moral and ethical cloud, as he has been shown to have lied about when he learned about former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian government leaders, including Vladimir Putin and the Russian Ambassador to the United States.
And actually, there now seems to be evidence that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also seemed to know of Trump collusion with the Russian government as early as June 2016, and told his House colleagues to stay quiet and remember they are part of a team to work for the party over any such evidence.
So we might be faced with a constitutional crisis worse than imagined as the top three leaders of the government under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947–the President, the Vice President, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives–might all be compromised as having knowledge of or collusion with a foreign government that worked to undermine the American electoral process, and to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the Presidential Election of 2016.
If that unbelievable scenario turns out to be totally the case, then we would have the unprecedented situation of Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch of Utah, who has been in the US Senate for more than 40 years, and is the longest serving Republican Senator in all of American history, and age 83, becoming President of the United States!
Can this really be happening? Stay tuned!