Nonsense, Trump would have done just fine without Pence, an unknown outside of the midwest. Nobody held their nose and voted for Trump because bland uncharismatic nondescript Pence would be the VP. The only characteristic Trump’s running mate needed was to be in the young side. Any Republican running mate would have worked, Trump was the star, the VP nothing but an afterthought. Pence is no Sarah Palin, who almost carried McCain over the finish line. Further, during the campaign of 2016, Pence showed himself to be quite treacherous. A lot of us wished at the time that he could be removed. Time has certainly proved us right!
Trump needed somebody who was conventional and non-threatening to win. If he’d gone with somebody unconventional and unexpected he might not have won.
You’re forgetting that even FR was filled with posters who didn’t trust Trump’s credibility as a conservative candidate. GOP primary voters reflected that skepticism. Go back and look at the results in 2016. Trump won the nomination by winning GOP primaries in states that he had no chance of winning in the general election — like New York, California, Illinois, and most of New England. Meanwhile, he lost primaries in a huge swath of some of the “reddest” places in Middle America.