In defying Trump, Pence risked all
Would they have actually done it – would the Jan. 6 mob have killed Mike Pence? And, in the process of wrenching the vice president away from his Secret Service protection on that terrible day in 2021, how many folks would have died on both sides? Pledged to do their duty, it’s impossible to imagine agents handing over Pence to the mob. Blood would have been shed, and possibly lots of it.
“Hang Mike Pence!” and “Where’s Mike Pence?” shouted some of the rioters. At one point, these political vigilantes were within 40 feet of the vice president. With rioters inside the Capitol, the Secret Service rushed the vice president and his wife, Karen, to a secure location somewhere off the Senate chamber.
At Wednesday night’s GOP candidates’ debate, Pence, now running for president in a field that includes his former boss Donald Trump, asked the seven who were on the stage with him, how many agreed that he had performed his duty to uphold the Constitution when he certified Joe Biden’s election in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, in the aftermath of the Capitol riot.
In recent weeks, Pence, however reluctantly, has emerged as Trump’s chief accuser – the witness prosecutors will be relying on to bear witness to the then-president’s interactions with him as the clock ticked down to perhaps the most horrible hour in American political history.
“You’re too honest,” Trump reportedly told Pence, after he asked the vice president to fudge the election results, thereby, presumably, handing the presidency over to Trump, despite Biden’s clear victory. Pence declined to do so.
At this same Oval Office gathering, the vice president’s chief lawyer, Gregory Jacob, told the participants that a plan to frustrate Biden’s ascension to the presidency would create a “disastrous situation” in which the election might “have to be decided in the streets.”
Soon after, Pence aides alerted Secret Service agents that they feared for the vice president’s safety. This came on the heels of Trump privately telling Pence that he would publicly criticize him for his failure to act.
At 5:05 on the afternoon of Jan. 5, 2021, Trump tweeted, “Washington being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election stolen…. Our country has had enough, they won’t take any more. We hear you (and love you) from the Oval Office.”
At 1 on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump was back on social media, “If Vice President Pence comes thru for us, we will win the presidency.”
Seven hours later, POTUS was still at it, tweeting, “Do it, Mike, this is time for extreme courage.”
At Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee – a debate Trump skipped in favor of an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson – Pence tried, without much success, to resurrect the optimistic Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.
He was brought back to earth by Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year old businessman and second-generation Trumper, who told Pence to reset his watch to reflect the fact that the country, happily for bomb throwers like Ramaswamy at least, was in a “dark moment,” the result of a war between two diametrically opposed political and social cultures.
To which Pence, Reagan-like, sputtered, “We need a government as good as the American people.”
At the recent Iowa State Fair, where candidates for president alight every four years, Pence was asked by a fairgoer why, in rebuffing Trump’s call for “extreme courage,” he had committed treason on Jan. 6.
Another fella gleefully wanted to know how life was treating Pence “since Tucker Carlson ruined your life.”
Pence, according to Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, shrugged it all off by noting that “from the moment we moved home to Indiana [and] began to travel the country, my overwhelming experience has been a very humbling expression of gratitude” from the people the Pences meet.
Karen Pence added, “People at the [Iowa] Fair come up with tears in their eyes, just holding back emotion, saying, ‘Thank you for saving our country.'”
The Pence presidential campaign has taken to hawking a T-shirt which proclaims, in big, bold lettering, “TOO HONEST.”
After the Wednesday debate, a talking head on MSNBC claimed the only reason Pence refused Trump’s promptings to steal the election was the specter of time in jail. Democrats are regularly dismissive of Pence, whom they portray as a Trump lackey.
Certainly, Vice President Pence’s fealty to President Trump sometimes appeared to border on the worshipful. However, when it came to crunch time, Pence stood up to the usurper Trump. Far too many in the party of Lincoln and Reagan have yet to do so.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.