Since presidential hopeful Donald Trump officially announced his vice presidential pick, the criticism hasn’t stopped.
Save statements from Republican associations approving Trump’s pick, both an expansive internet and social media community and Democratic organizations have been buzzing over the presumptive presidential nominee’s selection, and not in a good way.
After John Zody, chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party, said in a statement he thought Mike Pence had spent the past three years as governor focused only on himself, he said Pence would have to account for his bad reputation as Indiana’s governor while on the campaign trail.
“He has embarrassed Hoosiers, signed divisive and discriminatory legislation into law and alienated the business community, costing our state money in the process,” Zody said. “Unfortunately, that qualifies him as a compatible running mate for Donald Trump, who is out only for himself and running one of the most toxic presidential campaigns in history.”
The GOP’s official website, on the other hand, features a prominent headline deeming Pence a “rock solid VP pick.”
“Governor Mike Pence is a strong addition to the ticket,” Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, said in a release. “Governor Pence is an experienced public servant and a solid conservative whose policies have led to the longest period of uninterrupted job growth in Indiana’s history.”
The Trump and Pence topic has been trending on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and both conservatives and liberal voters have been discussing the news — in particular Trump’s speech announcing Pence as his VP — at length.
“At this point, I sincerely believe that this entire Trump campaign was a ‘Punk’d’ episode gone terribly wrong,” one Facebook poster wrote, linking her statement to a video of Trump’s speech introducing Pence.
“I couldn’t finish it,” another person wrote. “It was like seventh-grade Donald Trump introducing his vice president for student council.”
It takes a lot of scrolling to find something positive.
“Great choice,” one man writes, with a link to the same speech. “Trump will be our next president because in the final analysis Americans are smart enough to realize what message we are sending to the rest of the world, and to each other, when we elect a known criminal, and a known immoral husband, as the leaders of our country. Please pass this thought on if you agree.”
The post had only one like and zero shares.
Trump has faced a lot of criticism since delivering his speech, which many people claim barely mentioned Pence and, instead, focused more on the presidential nominee himself.
NBC News broadcasted a word cloud that showed a significant lack of Pence’s name mentioned throughout the speech. In a word cloud, words that are mentioned frequently are larger than words that are hardly mentioned. While “Mike” and “Pence” are larger than words like “Hillary,” “evangelicals,” “horrible” and “veterans” in the cloud, they’re about the same size as “Trump” and much smaller than “people,” “country” and “Indiana.”
Sunday, following his speech, Trump’s campaign released a statement from the presidential nominee and several selected media quotes and tweets about Pence being a positive pick.
The campaign’s release describes Trump’s choice as “a move that brings the party closer together as the Republican National Convention nears,” although Pence and Trump have been known to disagree on several core issues throughout the years.
Trump’s campaign also released a more comprehensive list of people joining their expanding team, including Nick Ayers as the Senior Advisor to Pence, Marty Obst as the Manager of Vice Presidential Operations and Marc Short as Mike Pence’s Communications Adviser.
“The campaign welcomes the addition of Governor Pence and his team of advisers to the ticket,” campaign chairman Paul Manafort said in the release. “Governor Pence is a man of impeccable character, and his addition to the ticket sends a powerful message to Hillary Clinton that America is not for sale.”
Trump’s next appearance is scheduled to be at the Republican National Convention, which starts Monday in Cleveland, Ohio.
