UPDATE, 4:40 pm: Donald Trump has postponed his VP announcement, initially slated for tomorrow, following an apparent terrorist attack in Nice, France. Multiple news outlets have already confirmed Pence as his selected running mate.

Oh great, its Mike Legislate Your Uterus Pence.
Oh great, it's Mike "Legislate Your Uterus" Pence. Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

Fuck. Not this guy again:

Donald J. Trump’s campaign has signaled strongly to Republicans in Washington that he will pick Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, as his running mate, though Republicans caution the party’s mercurial presidential candidate may still backtrack on his apparent choice.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have told national Republican officials that they are preparing to make an announcement with Mr. Pence, according to three people with knowledge of the conversations, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. His campaign has said that it will unveil a running mate for Mr. Trump in New York on Friday.

Here are some things to know about Indiana Governor Mike Pence:

Mike Pence was working tirelessly to defund Planned Parenthood before it became a popular thing for the GOP to waste time on (you know, along with acting like America's mass shooting epidemic can be solved with thoughts 'n' prayers). In 2007, while he was in Congress, Pence sponsored the very first bill attempting to defund the organization that's probably provided health care to most women you know*—and he kept right on sponsoring such garbage "legislation" until it passed the house in 2011. If the name "Pence" sounds at all familiar, that's why.

You might also know him from #PeriodsForPence, a social media campaign launched by Indiana women in response to a law signed by Pence that essentially criminalized miscarriage (and maybe periods?) by absurdly requiring women to pay for burial or cremation costs for miscarried or aborted fetuses. Of course, this is unenforceable, given that it's common for women to miscarry before even knowing they're pregnant. So Pence ended up—deservedly—the butt of an ongoing joke, with women contacting his office to give him updates on their periods. As far as grassroots organizing online is concerned, it was a pretty genius campaign.

But I want to be really fucking super clear about this: Anyone who ends up on the receiving end of that kind of campaign, because they'll cheerfully legislate women's physiology while knowing nothing about it, should not be allowed anywhere near the White House.



I suspect Trump picked Pence in a bad-faith effort to fire up the evangelical voters he alienated by saying that women should be punished for having abortions, then sort of retracting his comments later, a move that suggested that a man who's been caught many times on the record saying horrible things about women, and is an alleged rapist, was somehow not enough of a misogynist to warrant the support of a voting bloc that spends a helluva a lot of time and energy focused on women's sex lives. I suspect this is also why Trump's allied himself with antiabortion extremists with ties to actual domestic terrorism.

I can't decide if a Trump-Pence ticket is the ticket from hell or the thing that will alienate middle-of-the-road voters enough to prop up Hillary Clinton's campaign, which has been losing poll points recently (oh how I wish I could look away from the polls, but I can't; send help). Either way, though, I'm deeply disappointed that I'm going to have to waste any brainpower on Mike fucking Pence for the next three months. It's also interesting (in a bad way) to see the first woman major-party nominee for the presidency met with such a depressingly reactionary ticket. Luckily, though, it's looking less and less like you can win an American election on the votes of angry white dudes alone.

*DO I NEED TO SAY IT? Also men!