REVIEW: Mike Pence Illustrated What Trumpism Would Look Like After Trump

​Mike Pence wasn’t always particularly interested in leaping to the defense of Donald Trump during the vice presidential debate Tuesday. He was busy doing something else: offering a defense of the key themes of Trump’s campaign.

Tim Kaine, like Hillary Clinton before him, treated the debate as a referendum on the fitness of Donald Trump, as a human being, for office. That’s certainly a legitimate question, and there’s a lot of material there.

But Pence’s resistance to respond to Kaine’s attacks — what supporters of Clinton might see as his refusal to stand up for his candidate, and supporters of Trump might see as refusal to take the bait — was hardly an attempt to create a totally separate Republican platform or presidential campaign, or a reflexive snap back to the standard-issue conservatism of the pre-Trump Republican Party.

Pence offered up a vision that didn’t hit the Trump campaign’s ecstatic highs, but was better at quietly reassuring racial anxieties than the party’s current standard-bearer. And while Democrats might be notably progressive on racial issues in 2016, it’s still totally unclear, after Tuesday’s debate, whether they think they could beat a party that put Trumpism in Pencian terms.

Pence appealed to the same anxieties Trump did — but dialed back the outlandish promises

When Pence talked about the issues that Trump has made his bread and butter — immigration, terrorism, race — he talked about them through Trump’s lens and in Trump’s terms. If you don’t have borders you don’t have a country. Islamic radicalization in Europe is proof that we shouldn’t allow Syrian refugees into the US. The real problem with race relations in America is bias against police officers.

The most revealing parts of Tuesday night’s debate were the occasions where Pence launched practiced attacks on Hillary Clinton — attacks that Donald Trump had gestured at briefly, in the first debate or in subsequent appearances, but hadn’t really prosecuted with any particular focus.

The Trump campaign clearly thinks that Clinton screwed up hugely by referring to half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” — Trump’s tried to use that against Clinton himself, but it was Pence that gave the phrase enough gravity to make it seem like something he was genuinely upset about.

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