How Republicans’ 'private' support for 'cautionary scoundrel' Pence could dictate his fate: report

Former Vice President Mike Pence's refusal to go along with Donald Trump's plan to overturn the election on January 6, 2021 has made the former MAGA ally "a pariah" within the Republican Party, The Atlantic staff writer Mark Leibovich writes in a Thursday report.

Less than three weeks until Election Day, Leibovich raises the question: "Where does that leave Pence, a Christian conservative in a GOP now governed by one man’s impulses?"

The Atlantic writer notes, "At so many turns, his absence has spoken louder than his presence ever could. He is a reminder of Trump’s abject indecency, the former president’s pitiless trampling of norms and the consequence-free zone afforded him by the" GOP and conservative Supreme Court.

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"If Trump wins," Leibovich suggests, "maybe he softens and absolves his former vice president, who did nearly everything he asked." But no matter what — "Pence will endure as the cautionary scoundrel of the Trump age: one who was loyal to the bitter end, and barely lived to tell about it."

And although "friends of Pence say that many Republicans, including Trump supporters, will often express support for him. They tell him he is a good man, and they respect what he did, and that it’s unfair how he’s been treated," Lebovich notes that "these conversations almost always happen in private."

"They would never say as much in public—for fear, of course, of crossing Trump," The Atlantic writer adds.

City University of New York presidential historian and former Clinton speechwriter Ted Widmer told Leibovich, "Pence is always going to occupy this complex, almost unfathomable place, He says that by standing firm against Trump on January 6, Pence ensured himself a kind of historical purgatory. Nobody was as true blue of a Republican or loyal vice president as Pence was. Everything could have turned out so perfectly for him."

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Widmer added, "His refusal to help Trump thwart the will of American voters 'might buy Pence whatever the historian’s version of a mulligan is.' But it is also the same thing that was unforgivable in Trump’s moral universe."

The Atlantic's full report is available at this link (subscription required).