It says alot that looking back in retrospect, you can now say that by comparison Pence was by far the superior running mate pick, which you wouldn't have said back in 2016.
Like you said, he's surrounding himself with people who are only going to echo back to him what he wants to hear.
Which is now coming back to bite him in the ass... That whole 'Vance is a couchf.cker rumour' started out on twitter as a fake quote from a page in his auto-biography.... And the main reason it caught fire was because most of Trump's supporters took it as fact! Dumb and dumber indeed!
It's probably believable because I doubt any of them have actually read it. And let's be honest... Vance is a f'ing weirdo, so I wouldn't put a rumour like that past him.