Talk of impeaching Donald Trump began only a couple of months after he declared his candidacy for president in 2015. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, in a “dispatch from the future” for The Atlantic, wrote that “there’s no need to belabor the details of how the next four years unfolded: the budget crisis, President Trump’s impeachment, Vice President Cruz’s inauguration, the second budget crisis.” But the subject didn’t truly gain steam until Trump won the Republican nomination and then the general election—with Mike Pence, rather than Cruz, as his running mate.

The impeachment fantasy—which was confined to Democrats, journalists, and anti-Trump conservatives like New York Times columnist David Brooks—spawned a new genre of concern trolling on the left: that Mike Pence would be a worse president. With Trump now an increasingly scandalized president, and impeachment being discussed openly by elected Democrats and even some Republicans, the aforementioned liberals have returned to warn that kicking Trump out of the White House would not be an improvement over our current situation—that, in fact, a President Pence would be a bigger disaster for the progressive project than Trump has been.

“If Trump were impeached and convicted, Vice President Mike Pence, a right-wing, evangelical ideologue, would be a much more reliable and competent rubber stamp for the conservative policy agenda,” wrote Jeff Alson at In These Times. Megan Carpentier, writing at Dame, argued that “Pence may not tweet like a Ritalin-addicted teenager with an impulse-control problem, a deep sense of entitlement, and something to prove, and he probably has the good sense not to yell at other world leaders and constantly publicly praise the most murderous ones ... but in terms of actual, actionable policy decisions, the idea that Mike Pence would somehow be preferable to the man who is enacting every policy Mike Pence would himself enact is, and always was, the product of a fevered imagination.”

But Cliston Brown, a columnist at the Observer (which is owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser), offered the most apocalyptic take on a Pence presidency. “While Pence clearly has more self-control and self-awareness than Trump, that’s exactly what makes him more dangerous. He has all the same ideas and goals as Trump—and, as an added bonus, a religious-right agenda that’s even worse—and a much better chance of actually implementing them,” Brown wrote. Trump’s presidency will continue to be a smoldering ruin, allowing Democrats to retake the House in 2018 and the White House in 2020 and putting the party “in a position to control the country for a decade.” By contrast, Brown argued, President Pence would win broad approval, cementing Republican control of government until 2024— at which point the Republicans could have a 7-2 Supreme Court majority that would cast a reactionary shadow for the next half-century.

There’s no question that Pence, a creature of the religious right, would be a terrible president, although in ways different than Trump. As I argued in mid-November, when this meme first took hold on the left, “A Pence presidency would be one particular nightmare, the rule of Trump another one entirely. To use the language of Dungeons and Dragons: Pence is Lawful Evil and Trump is Chaotic Evil.” Trump is more likely to blunder into a nuclear war, while Pence is more likely to push America down the road to a rigid theocracy. The worst-case scenario under Trump is the world of Mad Max, while under Pence it would be The Handmaid’s Tale.