As Republican insiders reportedly have new worries that Democratic victories in the 2018 midterm election could mean the impeachment of President Donald Trump, investigative journalist Jane Mayer, in her latest piece for The New Yorker, offers an in-depth warning about “the danger of President Pence.”

“The worse the President looks, the more desirable his understudy seems,” writes Mayer, noting that left- and right-wing commentators alike have increasingly wished that Vice President Mike Pence would ascend to the Oval Office.

While she details their ideological differences—”Trump campaigned as an unorthodox outsider, but Pence is a doctrinaire ideologue”—Mayer makes another notable distinction: “Pence is the inside man of the conservative money machine.”

White House counselor and former Pence staffer Kellyanne Conway has described Pence as “a full-spectrum conservative,” while former While House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he is “the outreach guy, the connective tissue” between the Trump administration and the most conservative wing of the Republican establishment.

Serving as that “connective tissue,” as Mayer explains, also means keeping a cozy relationship with billionaires who donate to Republican candidates:

Doug Deason, a Texas businessman who attended the party on election night, told Mayer, “Mike and I are pretty good friends,” adding, “He’s really the contact to the big donors.”

Deason wasn’t the only elite donor supposedly enlisted by Pence. Koch Industries co-owner David Koch—who, along with his brother and business partner, Charles, is infamous for bankrolling GOP campaigns—was among the elite crowd celebrating upstairs, and as Mayer notes, his “presence was especially unexpected.”