FILE PHOTO: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence watches as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a signing ceremony with Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti at the White House in Washington, U.S., September 4, 2020. REUTERS/Leah Millis
October 2, 2020
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, next in line for the Oval Office, has tested negative for COVID-19, hours after President Donald Trump announced that he was infected and went into quarantine, Pence’s spokesman said on Friday.
Trump’s test result cast a spotlight on Pence, a Christian conservative former lawmaker who has been one of the few constants in the Republican president’s tumultuous administration, a little more than a month before the two seek re-election to a second term.
Pence, 61, is scheduled to debate his Democratic rival, Joe Biden’s running mate Senator Kamala Harris on Wednesday, and it was not immediately clear how or if Trump’s positive test would change that plan.
“This morning, Vice President Pence and the Second Lady tested negative for COVID-19. Vice President Pence remains in good health and wishes the Trumps well in their recovery,” spokesman Devin O’Malley said on Twitter.
Trump and Pence will work from separate residences, a White House official told Reuters, and their staffs will also be separated to protect Pence should he need to assume the duties of the presidency. Pence receives the same intelligence briefings as the president.
Pence would take over as acting president should Trump become incapacitated while undergoing medical treatment. That has happened three times in U.S. history.
Then-President George W. Bush temporarily transferred power to Vice President Dick Cheney twice, for a few hours each in 2002 and 2007, while undergoing colonoscopies. Vice President George H.W. Bush was acting president for nearly eight hours in 1985 while President Ronald Reagan had a pre-cancerous lesion removed. [L1N2GT0V8]
The White House said Trump is “not incapacitated” and is working in isolation while experiencing mild symptoms.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is next in line of succession after Pence. She said on Friday that she had been tested for COVID-19 and should know her results soon.
Harris tested negative on Thursday as part of her campaign’s routine screening for the virus.
Pence, a former governor of Indiana, has played a largely behind-the-scenes role in Trump’s White House, although he is known to have presidential ambitions of his own.
His deference has endeared him to Trump, helping Pence survive in a White House with near-constant turnover among top officials. But he has sometimes been ridiculed for his public obsequiousness to his boss.
Earlier this year Trump put Pence in charge of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, a brief that has not gone well. The nation’s death toll from the virus is over 207,000. New cases of COVID-19 rose in 27 out of 50 U.S. states in September compared with August, a Reuters analysis showed.
Pence has also been central to some of the administration’s legislative efforts, including the tax cuts passed in 2017. Pence staunchly opposes abortion rights and passionately supports de-regulation of business and shrinking the size of government.
(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Scott Malone and Alistair Bell)
