1 to 1.5 cheers for Mike Pence
Pence did a lot to enable Trump, but also did the right thing when it counted.
Note to self: never do anything to get on Kevin Williamson’s bad side. Because the man wields his pen like a samurai sword.
(For this analogy to work I assume he writes out his columns in longhand, because it’s hard to wield a keyboard like a samurai sword.)
On January 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump was in the midst of trying to overthrow the government of these United States in a soft coup d’etat, attempting to hold onto power illegally, illegitimately, and unconstitutionally while preventing the legitimately elected administration of (incredibly enough!) Joe Biden to take office. In order for this plot to work, Trump would have needed the cooperation of scores of state and local officials, judges, and members of Congress that, thankfully, did not materialize. One of the people Trump tried to bully into going along with the plot was Mike Pence, who served a key if largely ceremonial function in certifying the Electoral College results. Pence declined to go along with that.
There are a couple of possible ways to read Pence’s refusal of Trump’s demand: We might be generous and assume that Pence is a patriot and a man of honor—one who takes seriously an oath ending in the words “so help me God”—and acted as he did out of the best of motives. But there is not much evidence that Pence is a patriot or a man of honor, one who takes seriously an oath ending in the words “so help me God.” I know that sounds harsh, and I’ll come back to it directly.
The second possible explanation of Pence’s actions is that he knew he had ridden the Trump train as far as it was going to take him, that Trump’s daft coup d’etat was never going to succeed, that the people in charge of it were feckless has-beens like Rudy Giuliani and outright lunatics like Sidney Powell, that going along with those fools would be political suicide for a man who still hoped to be president himself one day, and that the most likely fruit to be born from that packet of poison seeds was a crop of felony indictments. Pence, who has been running for office since the 1980s (he failed to get himself elected to the House in 1988 and then again in 1990), is, lest we forget, a graduate of an accredited law school and a former lawyer: He knew enough not to go down with that sinking ship.
To watch him strut and preen today about his actions on that day, you’d think that he did more than simply refuse to violate the most basic responsibilities of public life and clear the very lowest bar possible by not going out of his way to nuke his own political career and join an abortive coup attempt organized by a half-organized gaggle of clueless cretins who could not find their own asses with both hands and a map. Mike Pence is like the guy who wants brownie points for not cheating on his girl.
[…]
Instead of treating January 6 like what it was—an indictment of his own poor political judgment and an outrage for which he bears considerable personal culpability owing to his actions in the four years leading up to the natural climax of Trump-style politics—he treats it like a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once I have helped lead the nation to the brink of disaster, you can count on me to do the right thing, one time, at the last minute, while trying to stay in good graces with the would-be tyrant I helped put in the White House” (if I may summarize loosely) is not quite as inspiring as Pence seems to think it is. The fact that this guy canonized himself in a subsequent book titled So Help Me God is the toxic icing on the raw-sewage cake.
There are better and worse explanations for how Pence conducted himself during the Trump years—but there are not any good explanations.
Setting aside the Constitution (because these guys have always been happy to set aside the Constitution when it suits them), Pence had an up-close-and-personal view of Trump’s personal moral grotesquerie for years on end. Pence—who famously goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid being alone with female colleagues—knew what kind of porn-star-chasing buffoon he was pairing up with. Pence may not be the smartest guy in the room, but he does know how to read, and the reading public has known what type of man Trump is since the 1980s. The hush-money payoffs to the pornographic actress, the endless lies, the blasphemy, the extortion—none of this could plausibly have surprised Pence. He can’t plead ignorance.
But what did he do? “Sycophantic” isn’t a strong enough word to describe Mike Pence’s attitude toward Donald Trump. He was comically, neurotically servile. The Washington Post chronicled a stretch of one meeting during which Pence praised Trump every 12 seconds—if you had tried to write that into The Death of Stalin, the critics would have called it heavy-handed. Trump was what Trump always was—Pence knew it, went along with it, enabled it, attacked those who had the patriotism to criticize the administration and to call it by its right name, and abased himself in every imaginable way to further its power when he thought doing so would suit his own ends.
And Pence wasn’t a mere bystander: He was right in the middle of the Michael Flynn mess, and lied about it, saying he had no knowledge of Flynn’s foreign dealings when he did.
January 6 was hardly the first time Donald Trump showed himself to be morally unfit for the presidency. Pence treats his performance on that day like the red badge of courage, but what he deserves is a scarlet letter—not an “A” for adultery but an “I” for idolatry, a “C” for cowardice, and a “K” for knavery.
Tell me you weren’t thinking “ICK!” when you watched him on that debate stage.
I agree with almost every word of this, and not just because I’m afraid Williamson might find my home address.
And yet…I still think Pence, a man whose politics I find more radical than Trump’s in some respects, deserves credit for not giving in to Trump on January 6. Was it the bare minimum required of him? Maybe, but it’s one thing to do your job and another thing to do your job when people are threatening to hang you for doing it.
For all the talk about “cancel culture,” I wonder if a phrase like “unforgiveness culture” better describes political and social discourse in the Trump and hopefully-post-Trump era.
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