In the first months of the Trump administration, Mike Pence appears to have performed a miraculous balancing act: pledging loyalty to his boss while gliding away from incessant scandal and turbulence, hair unruffled, a confident smile on his face. In an epically chaotic administration, he was the sane one, the competent one. He was taking the best of Trump—the base—and discarding the worst. In May, he started his own PAC, and he’s already been cultivating big G.O.P. money, fueling speculation about his political future. The thought of President Pence—whether in 2024 or much sooner—pleased many conservatives, and made Democrats afraid. “He has sort of been above the fray . . . It seems he’s escaped any of the fallout,” David Woodard, a G.O.P. political consultant and professor of political science at Clemson University, told me. “Pence has kind of a lunch bucket mentality of a day-to-day working member of the administration . . . quietly working and not much in the forefront.”

Last week, however, Pence seemed to stumble on the wire. When the Donnygate scandal hit at the start of last week and Donald Trump surrogates took to the airwaves to offer full-throated defenses of the president, Mike Pence’s aides took a more selfish line. “The vice president was not aware of the meeting,” Marc Lotter, Pence’s press secretary, said of the controversial rendezvous between senior members of the Trump campaign, a Russian attorney and alleged ex-Soviet spy last June. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about a time before he joined the ticket.” Lotter added, “The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda.”

But Pence, for almost the first time, was wobbling. The denial incited a flurry of headlines suggesting that Pence sought to put daylight between himself and the president and was reportedly viewed by some in the White House as an affront to President Trump. Pence’s team promptly sought to quash the narrative that he was anything but loyal to his boss, lambasting it as “offensive.” But the strong word underlined how eager Pence’s team is to put the episode in the rearview.

Video: 5 Things About Mike Pence That Won’t Make America Great Again

Then came health care. Pence had made a show of rolling up his sleeves and diving into the specifics, a businesslike soldier for the president’s agenda. But his trip to the National Governors Association summer meeting last Friday was widely panned. He was a highly imperfect messenger for the bill, given that he’d expanded Indiana’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act, himself, and some of his statements from the podium—for instance, that millions wouldn’t lose coverage under the Senate health-care bill and that the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare has resulted in disabled Americans being denied care—were risible falsehoods. His attacks on John Kasich of Ohio made him look out of his depth. “This is a dramatic change to what most of us have reacted to within the last four years,” Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s popular Republican governor, told reporters. Democratic Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut characterized Pence’s tactics as “ham-handed.”

“His number one success while he was governor was implementing the plan called Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0. And that was a Medicaid expansion program that looked just like any other Medicaid expansion program,” Michael Leppert, a Democratic lobbyist in Indiana, said in an interview. “He will have a hard time reconciling that, and that reconciliation is where I think you’re probably going to find most of his mistakes coming from. What message he’s trying to deliver—and what’s real.”