ALEX WITT (HOST): Alright you guys, reaction to all of this. I mean, Katy [Tur] and Hallie [Jackson] have both brought up such great points. The fact that it did not look like the twosome going forward. It was all about Trump, as expected. But then the role of Mike Pence is what?
JOY REID: It was weird. The body language between them was sort of stiff and awkward. And then when Trump sort of handed off the podium to him but didn't stand there with him, that was a little strange, right? You expected at least that he would stand there and give the cameras that two-shot, that sort of unity two-shot and then there was sort of a handshake at the end. And he took a really long time to start talking about Mike Pence. It was a lot about himself, a lot of what we've heard before, as both Katy and Hallie have mentioned, a lot of the stump speech, a lot of, “Hey, I won this, and the party needs to come to me.” I think what Pence is is he's a permission pick. He's for those Republicans who want to vote for Donald Trump because he's a Republican, as they are, and they don't like Hillary Clinton. But there's been something missing, something that hasn't allowed them to publicly support him, to feel sort of publicly good about supporting Donald Trump. I think that the purpose of Mike Pence is for them to be able to say, “Well, I'm voting because that guy is on the ticket, he'll shepherd the Supreme Court picks, he'll be somebody Donald Trump listens to.” I think the flaw of that is, it's not clear that Donald Trump would listen to Mike Pence or anyone else. He has to have him on the ticket, but I can't see them campaigning together. It was very awkward.
WITT: Yeah. What do you think?
ED O'KEEFE: Running mates don't necessarily campaign together all that often. They have this convention week and then they go their separate ways. Because he checks all those boxes, Pence can go and sort of motivate the base, go to fundraisers, be a voice box on talk radio and in television interviews and be the attack dog. I think if you look at the speech he gave, it was a red meat conservative speech. You know, “We are going to do everything we can to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president.” That's what Republicans want to hear right now. He articulated it probably a little more clearly than Trump usually does. I think Trump's problem today, let's use Hollywood terms because he's a Hollywood guy, he's struggling to deal with a co-star and he's going to have to adjust to that. And we're going to have to figure out here, does Pence become a full partner in the campaign strategy, and in the governing strategy, or is he just a guy that gets deployed every so often to take care of certain things?
