Mike Pence is going down. Why not go down a hero?

03 August 2023

In Wednesday’s edition, I talked about Mike Pence and the fact that his chances of winning the 2024 election are the slimmest of chances, not only because he’s got to get around Donald Trump to win the Republican Party nomination, but also because former vice presidents and sitting vice presidents, even when they win their party primaries, usually go on to lose.

I wrote that piece before the Justice Department unsealed a third criminal indictment against a criminal former president, this one in connection to his leadership of an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government. The Postreported that, among other things, the indictment’s 45 pages reference “Mike Pence or the office of the vice presidency more than 100 times, reflecting Pence’s role as a central figure in the charging document.”

So the investigation of the J6 insurrection centers on the former vice president, but the former vice president’s campaign for president does not center on the J6 insurrection (or its investigation). You’d think that a candidate who’s running on “traditional, Reaganesque principles,” according to the Post, would find ways to make hay out of his role in saving the republic.

I mean, if you’re going down, why not go down a hero?

Recall that Trump’s coup attempt had two fronts, one outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and one inside. On the inside, the plan was for Mike Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to reject electoral votes from key states that went to Joe Biden. On the outside, the plan was a violent assault to pressure Pence into following through with the coup attempt.

Pence rejected having any part in treason, though.

The third indictment “details a Jan. 4, 2021, meeting, where Trump allegedly repeated his false claims of widespread election fraud,” the Postreported. “Pence questioned Trump lawyer John Eastman’s proposal to send the election results back to the states, asking if it was ‘defensible.’ After Eastman … suggested that “nobody’s tested it before,” Pence allegedly told Trump, ‘Even your own counsel is not saying I have that authority.’”

He rejected the proposal, not only in the above meeting, but many times, over and over. And for that, Mike Pence was valorized by the House Democrats who later impeached Trump for J6. “On that day [J6], he lived up to his oath of office,” said Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who led the impeachment trial. “He was a constitutional patriot. They were chanting – I heard them chanting – ‘hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.’ They meant it.”

“Constitutional patriot” is a great slogan for a self-declared “constitutional conservative,” and indeed, Pence’s campaign launch in Iowa began by making J6 “a key theme in his speech, emphasizing that Trump’s actions were ‘reckless’ and that ‘anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.’”

But now, more than a month later, “Pence doesn’t typically mention Jan. 6 in his town halls or stump speeches unless he’s asked about it, instead focusing on the Biden administration,” the Postreported. Why? The more Trump lies about J6, the worse things get for Pence. His former chief of staff, Marc Short, told the Post recently that “Mike had very high favorables until the president [Trump] started misrepresenting the events of Jan. 6.”

Pence’s problem, however, says more about the GOP than it says about him. I like how Post reporter Marianne LeVine put it: Pence’s campaign is “a test for whether there is any appetite left in the Republican primary electorate for the traditional, Reaganesque principles that influenced Pence’s career.”

And the Republican primary electorate is failing.

If it were not failing, Pence might be ideally positioned to take advantage of his well-earned reputation as a “constitutional patriot.” But much of the party now sees his loyalty to the Constitution as disloyalty to Trump. It’s no such thing, of course, but that’s not going to help Pence in the end.

That end is predictable. As a Republican pollster put it, he’s already “caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s too Trumpy for the non-Trumpies and not Trumpy enough for the Trumpies.” But even if, by some miracle, he gets around Trump for the Republican nomination, former vice presidents as well as sitting vice presidents usually go on to lose. The only exceptions in the last 100 years have been Richard Nixon in 1968 and Joe Biden in 2020.

Why not go down a hero? Pence has not said whether he will testify against Donald Trump, but can you think of a better way of burnishing his reputation as a “constitutional patriot” than by standing tall in open court against the paramilitary leader of the worst of all constitutional crimes?

Anyway, what does he have to lose, other than the slimmest of chances of winning? To paraphrase the former vice president’s hero, Ronald Reagan, Pence didn’t leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left Pence.

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