It was perhaps the greatest thesis-and-antithesis duo in the White House since cool and ironic John F. Kennedy and coarse and self-pitying Lyndon Johnson. Pence was contained, orderly, controlled, and reticent, rigid in his religious beliefs and doctrinaire in his pro-life, pro-business, limited-government conservatism. Trump was the opposite of all those things.

In a looking-glass world, Pence was the standard-bearer of an ever-more-conservative Republican Party—and pay no attention to Donald Trump. That was how the VP conducted himself: if only you complied with all the outward manifestations of loyalty and acquiescence to the president, you could otherwise pretend that he did not exist. Republican life could go on in its dedicated fashion, with only a ritual bow to the Trump distraction. Indeed, the vice president’s was the reliably functioning, professionally organized office in the West Wing. If you actually wanted something done in the Trump White House (and it wasn’t a pet project of Jared and Ivanka’s), a good bet was to call the vice president’s people.

This seemed to hold Pence in place, this sense that he was the real thing while an illusion occupied the White House. Likewise, Trump was largely restrained, his annoyances and grievances held at bay, because Pence seemed so satisfied with his own marginal standing.

Yes, but … even when Trump was largely satisfied, he was still storing up real and imagined wrongs and offenses that he might put into play at any time.

Eager to downplay the COVID crisis and to push off responsibility for it, during the first spike in the spring, Trump had given the vice president leadership of the pandemic portfolio. With some obvious political sense, Pence had tried to mount a good-government show of concern. But Pence’s news conferences, with the attendant experts—Dr. Fauci, a sudden hero of science and reason; and Dr. Birx, apparently unwilling to surrender her reputation wholly to the White House—then became a challenge to Trump, both for the attention they received and for the way their facts undermined Trump’s frequent don’t-worry messages. Indeed, many in the White House came to blame Pence for elevating Fauci and Birx, in fact, making them famous, to the president’s clear detriment.

It was one of Trump’s off-book advisors, the secretive Ike Perlmutter, a Palm Beach neighbor, Mar-a-Lago member, and show business billionaire (Perlmutter bought a bankrupt Marvel Comics and sold it to Disney for $4 billion) with whom the president spoke frequently, who advised him to push Pence and the other experts from the stage and get back out there himself. Trump was missing out on ratings gold.

In Trump’s broad with-him-or-against-him silos, a perceptual free association that it was hard for anyone to escape, Pence had fallen into what advisors were calling COVID-land, a hostile place.

Trump’s annoyance with Pence now spread into the election challenge.