Of course Mike Pence is preparing to run for president of the United States. To do otherwise would be a dereliction of duty.

That’s the main takeaway from all the chatter over the weekend regarding a New York Times story alleging that the vice president is making a series of moves that would enable him to launch a campaign for the White House in 2020, as are a smattering of other senators and governors. If it sounds exceedingly early for that sort of talk, well, it is. As the Times put it, these are “political steps unheard-of so soon into a new administration.”

Pence vehemently denied the reporting, saying in a statement, “Whatever fake news may come our way, my entire team will continue to focus all our efforts to advance the president’s agenda and see him re-elected in 2020. Any suggestion otherwise is both laughable and absurd.” President Donald Trump, he of the exceedingly thin skin, decided to attack the Times via his Twitter account, in a thinly veiled response to the article.

But that thin skin is certainly an issue here. Pence needed to forcefully deny the Times’ reporting, because if Trump has shown anything over the six months he’s been in the Oval Office, it’s that overshadowing the boss is a quick route to the White House equivalent of sleeping on the couch.

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That said, Pence has every reason, both political and practical, to be laying the groundwork to either run in the next presidential election or to take over the White House before then and run as the incumbent in 2020. (And, for the record, he hasn’t asked the Times for a real correction.) After all, the current occupant is an elderly, volatile man who has made no secret that he disdains any semblance of healthy living, and who is under investigation by a special counsel before his first summer in office is up. His approval ratings are in a negative territory that is unprecedented for this point in an administration.

Honestly, for Pence, doing anything other than preparing to take over the top job would be the height of irresponsibility.

As my editor Robert Schlesinger wrote recently, there are several ways Trump could leave office, with the most likely being that he finishes two terms or loses his re-election bid next time around to a Democrat. But that doesn’t mean that the chances of the other scenarios – impeachment, resignation or removal via the 25th Amendment – are zero. And since there’s a non-zero chance Trump hits the exits via something other than the traditional means, it makes sense for Pence to be operating as if it could happen.

And since this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, the chances of those unlikelier scenarios occurring are certainly higher than they were with, say, Barack Obama or George H.W. Bush. Trump is not only the oldest president America has ever had, but he actively disdains physical activity, because he seems to believe that humans have only a finite supply of energy. And his diet is terrible. Thus, it’s certainly not out of the question that he doesn’t finish his term for natural reasons, or that he is simply incapable of handling the vigors of the campaign trail in a few years and so can’t run for re-election. If that winds up being the case, Pence’s groundwork will prove useful.

Also, despite his stream of denials, Trump’s every action in office seems designed to show that he thinks special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and now Trump’s financial dealings, will turn up something. Trump has fired or tried to get rid of anyone connected to the investigation, and at every turn has chosen to lie about his and his team’s various interactions with Russian officials, rather than coming clean. He’s actively warned Mueller against delving into his family’s finances, which Mueller is doing anyway. There may not be a fire yet, but there’s an awful lot of smoke.

Pence and his team have presumably noticed the same thing. And again, that Trump’s early exit from office isn't likely doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. So Pence is doing the smart thing by taking whatever steps necessary to ensure he is the first one out of the gate if the unlikely suddenly becomes the inevitable, or to hit the ground running if he ends up inheriting what is left of Trump’s term

That, after all, is the main point of the vice president: to be prepared to step into the top job no matter the circumstances. The vice presidency is famously “not worth a bucket of warm piss” and “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” where the “constitutional obligation [is] to have a pulse.” But it’s also just as famously one heartbeat away from the presidency. Pence is acting like it, and that he and his other Republican colleagues are breaking new political ground in terms of timing makes sense, since we're all in territory that is pretty well untrod when it comes to the American executive.

To be clear, while a President Pence would in many ways be an upgrade, I still don’t cherish the idea of him bringing his brand of conservative theocracy to the White House. And since he signed up for the ticket, he's certainly complicit in any negative effects of the Trump administration.