President Pence? Don’t bet against it | Tim Dowling

I spent last weekend at the Bath festival, where I had been invited to appear on a panel about the first four months of Donald Trump’s presidency, alongside Professor Sarah Churchwell, the writer Emma Kennedy and Stephen Bush of the New Statesman. When it comes to appearing on panels I’ve discovered that if you keep your mouth shut you can learn a lot, although I accept this strategy is probably at odds with the wishes of the organisers.

Anyway, silence proved unfeasible - the chair, Mark Lawson, asked each of the panellists to predict whether it would be necessary, or even possible, for us to convene a follow-up panel about President Trump in a year’s time. I was slightly wrongfooted by this, and said I would have to check my diary. In the end I voted with the half of the panel that believed Trump would not last a full year, a conviction based on a combination of wishful thinking and online betting markets. Paddy Power, for example, offers longer odds for Trump departing in 2018 than in 2017, and longer still for 2019. I don’t imagine that UK bookies have a direct line to the FBI investigation, but I’m fairly certain they know something I don’t.

With most of the panel accepting the increasing likelihood that Trump will not survive a full first term (we checked our phones to make sure he was still in charge just before we took the stage), thoughts turned to what America would be like under President Mike Pence. Seen by many as a man who only joined what was supposed to be a doomed Republican ticket so he could extract himself from his disastrous governorship of Indiana, he is perhaps the only person in an immediate position to threaten Trump’s lock on the title of Worst US President Ever.

It was suggested that Pence is possessed of a familiar and reliable combination of venality and ignorance – essentially, stupidity for sale – that makes him more attractive as an enemy than Trump; he at least can be counted on to act in a certain way. This is not an attractive prospect, I’ll admit, but it’s where you end up when the devil you know remains essentially unknowable.

What’s the problem?

Another panel topic – raised hastily by me before anyone else could – concerned what exactly might be wrong with Trump: is he a narcissist? A sociopath? An idiot? Some unholy combination of the three?

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has long barred its members from diagnosing public figures at a remove. This became known as the Goldwater rule, after a 1964 petition signed by more than 1,000 psychiatrists declaring the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater “psychologically unfit” to be president of the United States. Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine that published it, and the psychiatrists of America learned a lesson.

However, as the New Yorker reported this week, the profession is now reconsidering its longstanding position. There is a move within the APA to have another look at the Goldwater rule, based on the notion that psychiatrists have a duty of care to the public that overrides diagnostic precaution. If the move succeeds, the Trump exception to the Goldwater rule may yet be the president’s most lasting legacy.

Up the Hatch

Not everybody at the Bath festival was worried about the possibility of a Pence presidency. One panellist was convinced the Russia scandal would eventually prove such a tangled web that several politicians constitutionally designated to take over from Trump – including Pence – could get caught up in it.

She believed that Orrin Hatch – an 83-year-old senator from Utah who, in his capacity as the functioning head of the Senate in the vice-president’s absence, is third in the line of succession – will be the most likely next US president.

That may sound like a long shot, but at this point a bet on Hatch has got to be worth £20 of anyone’s money.