The second lady's sudden transformation, her participation in Trump campaign events and her gushing praise of the president stem from a desire to protect her husband’s political future and fiercely defend him in an election contest that seems to get uglier by the day, according to eight current and former administration officials and people close to the Pence family who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity.

The arrangement is mutually beneficial: The vice president maintains his popularity with Trump’s religious conservative base, while the campaign gains a notable surrogate who can speak directly to the suburban women trending away from the president.

“Mrs. Pence is no stranger to campaigning and is looking forward to being on the campaign trail for the 2020 presidential election,” Kara Brooks, a spokeswoman for Karen Pence, said in a statement.

“Her participation in campaign events, such as 'Women for Trump,' are opportunities to highlight the great accomplishments of the administration. She also gets a chance to share information about her military spouse awareness campaign and art therapy initiative,” Brooks added.

It could be the greatest political challenge she has faced, as Trump gets hit from all sides during the constant drip of impeachment news and foreign policy flare-ups tied to Ukraine and Syria. The second lady’s unscathed image and relatively low profile — her family’s pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo, has 12 times more Instagram followers than she does — gives her a clean slate of sorts to make her case on behalf of Trump and her husband to voters who may be skeptical of the duo heading into 2020.

Karen Pence talks about the U.S. Special Olympics World Games team in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump in July. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It also comes as she and the vice president aim to restore their image as faithful foot soldiers for the Trump agenda after the release of books this summer by journalists Tim Alberta of POLITICO and Tom LoBianco that detailed a pair of episodes in which Pence vowed to not appear on the campaign trail beside her husband if he carried on as the president’s running mate after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged and refused to kiss him on election night.

“Oh boy. Mother is not going to like this,” Trump told aides at the time, anticipating her reaction to hearing Trump’s lewd comments, Alberta wrote in his book.

But that attitude was hardly on display last week when Pence hit the campaign trail for her first appearance at a “Women for Trump” event. In fact, nowhere was her embrace of the president more palpable. The second lady, whom Trump apologized to after the “Access Hollywood” scandal broke, told attendees in St. Paul, Minn., she is “all-in” for the president after seeing him interact with her daughter Charlotte.

Appearing alongside presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump and campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, she also urged the crowd to “get on your knees” to pray for the president.

Asked about her remarks, one of the vice president’s former House colleagues said they were characteristic of Pence, who defended her husband through his stints as chairman of the staunchly conservative Republican Study Committee, Republican Conference chairman and Indiana governor before he joined the GOP presidential ticket in 2016.

“Karen knows a lot about campaigns, she knows a lot about politics and she knows what she’s in for, and she likes to practice it at a very high level of competition,” the former colleague said. “She knows they’re in for the fight of their life right now as part of the ticket, and she does not shirk away from that responsibility.”

Campaign officials said the Minnesota event was the first of many appearances Pence will make in the coming months, in addition to making local radio and television interviews while traveling. The second lady, whose husband hosted a conservative radio program in the 1990s, did a series of radio interviews ahead of Trump’s June 2020 kick-off rally in Orlando, Fla., which one official described as “a natural fit” for her.

Until now, her solo travel has usually been linked to her art therapy initiative, an issue she has worked on since 2011, or support for military spouses.

“I want to get more people aware of art therapy, not only for children who are going through an illness but adults as well who have gone through trauma,” Pence, a watercolorist who has illustrated two children’s books with her daughter Charlotte, told The New York Times in 2017.

With the exception of an appearance she made shortly before last year’s midterm elections on behalf of congressional candidate Mark Harris (the North Carolina Republican later abandoned his effort to win the seat after revelations that his campaign had become entangled in a voter fraud operation), Pence has mostly traveled with her husband on his diplomatic missions and domestic trade tours. Just last month, she accompanied him on his trip to Poland, where Pence met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That meeting has come under scrutiny as Democrats work to determine whether the vice president was aware of the pressure campaign that has landed Trump at the center of an impeachment inquiry.

A spokeswoman for Pence said she did not join her husband on Wednesday when he left for Turkey, where he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are set to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an effort to negotiate a cease-fire in northeastern Syria.

Officials familiar with the planning said the vice president’s built-in team on the 2020 campaign is devising a messaging strategy and schedule that maximizes the couple’s strengths as surrogates — including dispatching Pence, a Kansas native, to suburban swing districts and Midwestern battleground states to tout the administration’s work on health care, education and family issues.

“The 2016 staff didn’t know how to utilize Karen Pence, but now there’s a VP staff that knows her. You look at her experience of being a mother of three, of being a wife of someone who’s been in the public eye for 30 years, and you’ll hear about anything from her that really goes back to family issues and stuff that’s important to women,” said the GOP source familiar with Trump’s reelection operation.

This person added that Pence will likely be deployed to suburban media markets and that communities outside “Atlanta, Houston, Dallas [and] Detroit would be really good for her.”

She is also expected to highlight the president’s track record of selecting conservative judges for appellate and circuit court appointments — an issue that resonates with the same white evangelical voters who Pence helped put at ease when he was added to the ticket in 2016.

“Particularly with the faith community, Karen is a very capable emissary,” the former House colleague said.

It’s unclear whether a ramped-up campaign schedule will affect Pence’s part-time teaching position at Immanuel Christian School, a private K-8 school just outside Washington. The 2020-2021 school year would likely begin in August, right after both parties host their nominating conventions and just a few months from the November election. Brooks declined to respond to a question about Pence’s tenure at the school, while a campaign official said there have been “no discussions on whether she’ll leave Immanuel Christian to make herself more available to the campaign.”

The anticipated increase in her campaign activity comes as the vice president faces the most significant test yet of his loyalty to Trump, whose attempt to use his relationship with a foreign leader to conjure dirt on 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to endorse an impeachment investigation last month. Mike Pence, who’s sought to avoid being implicated in any wrongdoing by denying knowledge of the president’s overtures to Zelensky, recently launched a nationwide tour to swing districts occupied by Democrats who have endorsed the impeachment probe.