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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyNovember 13th, 2016
Chris Christie is out as head of the transition team as Mike Pence asserts his control:
President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to empower his running mate Mike Pence to steer the presidential transition gives the soon-to-be vice president a powerful hand in shaping the incoming government and could foreshadow that he will play an outsized role in the White House.
Pence’s ascension is in line with a recent trend toward influential vice presidents and appears similar to the last vice president who was handed the keys to a presidential transition: Dick Cheney.
…It also gives the vice president a chance to put his own stamp on the administration. While Trump ran as a political outsider and was not shy in burning bridges to establishment Washington, Pence is a popular GOP figure who may opt to select longtime allies for key roles.
“Those who get new jobs may feel beholden to the vice president and feel responsive to him,” said Goldstein. “It’s a way of guaranteeing a degree of loyalty.”
Key social conservatives are already filling key roles in Trump’s transition team. Family Research Council’s Kenneth Blackwell is in charge of the team’s Domestic Policy. Pence, as governor of Indiana, oversaw that state’s passage of its right-to-discriminate law, the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, in 2015. The law’s intent of allowing discrimination against gay people was so obvious that even Pence was unable to explain how discrimination wasn’t really discrimination.
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Lucrece
November 13th, 2016
Surprising, really. Trump has far more in common with Christie than he does Pence, which may be why Trump perceived Christie as a threat and chose Pence instead.
AnotherJosh
November 13th, 2016
As a resident of Indiana, I have to apologize to the nation. I, along with many of my fellow Hoosiers, were hopeful that this election would allow us to be rid of Pence without anyone else coming under the curse of being saddled with him. To my tremendous dismay, we not only elected Pence-lite to the governorship, but also contributed to cursing not just my state, but the rest of the country as well, with his leadership as quite possibly the most influential VP ever. That things not go too terribly for the LGBT community is all I can hope to see over the next four years. I voted against this mess every step of the way, but still feel sorry for us all for what’s probably to come.
Joseph Singer
November 14th, 2016
@Another Josh: In many ways Pence is even more dangerous than Donald Trump. Trump really has no firm position on anything and from the looks of it he is going to leave the ‘governing’ aspects to Pence. This should worry LGBTQs a lot since it is well known that Pence is a big homophobe who desires to make things as difficult as possible for LGBTQs. Donald Trump is still polishing his ‘reality TV’ creds for his future projects. He really never had any designs on doing what a president does to head the government. Trump’s aim all along was just to burnish his reputation as a reality TV charlatan.
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