WASHINGTON — He held firm when the “Access Hollywood” tape nearly ended President Trump’s 2016 campaign. He did not waver through even the most trying moments of the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
And once again, Vice President Mike Pence has risen to Mr. Trump’s defense at a moment of crisis that some Republicans fear could inflict lasting damage on them both.
Amid questions about Mr. Pence’s role in the campaign of political pressure directed at Ukraine’s government that has become the subject of a House Democratic impeachment action against Mr. Trump, the vice president appeared before reporters in Arizona on Thursday and was all in.
Hours after Mr. Trump defiantly escalated the impeachment drama by openly urging China’s government to investigate the business dealings there of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, Mr. Pence backed up his boss without apology, saying that Mr. Trump was making good on his campaign pledge to “drain the swamp.”
Mr. Pence also reiterated an earlier statement that the business Hunter Biden did in Ukraine while his father was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy toward the country was, as he put it on Thursday, “worth looking into.”
“The president made it very clear that he believes our other nations around the world should look into it as well,” Mr. Pence added.
No evidence has emerged to indicate that the elder Mr. Biden sought to steer American foreign policy based on his son’s foreign business dealings, and Hunter Biden has not been accused of any legal wrongdoing.
But Mr. Pence’s remarks further cemented his unlikely political bond with Mr. Trump, whose political style bears little relation to the vice president’s low-key Midwestern conservatism. It also reflected Mr. Pence’s apparent belief that he cannot afford to allow even a sliver of daylight to appear between himself and the president for fear of drawing Mr. Trump’s wrath and, potentially, that of core Republican voters.
“Daylight is deadly. That’s why he did what he did today,” said Michael Feldman, a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore. “His job as vice president is to support the president politically, no matter what. Even when the president is setting fire to his presidency.”
Mr. Gore found himself in a similarly awkward position in 1998, when Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Mr. Gore, too, remained steadfastly loyal. But unlike Mr. Pence, he never publicly supported Mr. Clinton’s defenses of his own conduct.
David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican strategist, said that in vigorously defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence was making the only move available to him. “No matter what comes out, the base is going to stick with Trump,” even if some Republican members of Congress do not.
Mr. Kochel added that Mr. Pence “is going to be judged by” the president and “his fervent supporters on his loyalty to the president.” But he said there is little downside politically for Mr. Pence in demonstrating his loyalty during the impeachment fight.
“Right now it’s framed as a partisan fight,” he said.
Still, in expressing criticism of his predecessor, Mr. Biden, Mr. Pence also seemed to underscore the quandary he faces in his proximity to a president bearing a large load of ethical and legal accusations.
“The simple fact is that, you know, when you hold the second-highest office in the land, it comes with unique responsibilities,” he said. “Not just to be above impropriety but to be above the appearance of impropriety.”
Mr. Pence, who was in Arizona meeting with Hispanic leaders when he talked to reporters, did not address questions about whether he had a role or knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to press foreign governments to investigate the Bidens and the origins of the F.B.I.’s 2016 investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
According to the whistle-blower complaint accusing Mr. Trump of improperly pressuring Ukraine on those subjects, Mr. Pence planned to attend the May inauguration of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, but canceled his trip at the instruction of Mr. Trump, who was seeking to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. But a source in Mr. Pence’s office said that no such trip had been planned.
And when Hurricane Dorian led Mr. Trump to cancel an early-September trip to Warsaw on which he was set to meet with Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Pence traveled in place of the president. While there, on Sept. 2, Mr. Pence denied to reporters that he had discussed the elder Mr. Biden with the Ukrainian leader.
“The president asked me to meet with President Zelensky and to talk about the progress that he’s making on a broad range of areas,” Mr. Pence said. “And we did that.”
Mr. Pence did not directly respond to a question at the time about whether the Trump administration had held up $391 million in military aid for the country this summer in order to further pressure Mr. Zelensky’s government. Instead he cited Mr. Trump’s complaint that Europe has not done more to assist Ukraine, adding that “as President Trump had me make clear, we have great concerns about issues of corruption.”
By that time, Mr. Trump’s public remarks had already conflated well-established concerns about endemic corruption in Ukrainian society with his more personalized notion of corruption in the country — namely the alleged activities of the Bidens and unfounded theories that it was Ukraine’s government that meddled in the 2016 election, not Russia’s.
Mr. Pence’s critics say that despite the vice president’s professions of ignorance about the core of Mr. Trump’s political agenda in Ukraine, he knew enough about the president’s mixing of foreign policy and politics to be implicated in any wrongdoing.
At the same time, Mr. Pence appears to have been almost willfully oblivious to Mr. Trump’s public obsession with Ukraine, the Bidens and conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 election that have also been amplified in public by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
“What’s unique about Pence is that he just feels he had no political fortune left in America if Trump didn’t tap him,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “His game plan is never to lose not just Donald Trump, but Trumpians,” Mr. Brinkley said.
“He doesn’t want to have any kind of backlash from the alt-right or conservative talk radio,” he added. “So all he does is megaphone Trump with the amplification lowered a few notches.”
But by defending Mr. Trump’s behavior to an extent that few other elected Republican officials did on Thursday, Mr. Pence may not only find himself drawn deeper into the impeachment morass, but also diverted from the message of economic growth and legislative action he has sought to promote as an antidote to the politics of the congressional inquiry.
While defending Mr. Trump’s call to investigate the Bidens on Thursday, Mr. Pence also stressed the president’s policy agenda, a theme his aides have also promoted during internal White House discussions about responding to the Democratic impeachment onslaught.
“The people of this country want us to focus on issues that matter most to them,” Mr. Pence said. “These endless investigations should end in Washington, D.C., and Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats ought to be focusing on issues of security, of prosperity, infrastructure, the U.S.M.C.A., lowering drug prices.”
Mr. Pence’s aides have argued that such a message would be effective against Democrats in red congressional districts and states where impeachment lacks strong support, especially when compared with kitchen-table issues.
The fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had cited those issues during her own public remarks on Wednesday before mentioning impeachment was a sign that she understands the risk of blowback from voters frustrated by legislative inaction in Washington.