Mike Pence in Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff

On Principles & Values: OpEd: extreme self-effacement: "I do funerals & cut ribbons"

Pence started nearly every speech saying, "I bring greetings from our forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump--"--a salutation directed more to the president than to the audience.

Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the shadow of Donald Trump. Little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House.

In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president who could not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme self-effacement.

Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.