As President Trump claims victory and posts bombastic tweets alleging electoral fraud, Vice President Mike Pence has adopted a familiar role: offering a nuanced defense of the president’s actions to conservative audiences.
“I want to promise you: We are going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted, and until every illegal vote is thrown out,” he told the Young America’s Foundation’s fall college retreat on Friday.
“And whatever the outcome at the end of the process, I promise you: We will never stop fighting to make America great again.”
Pence had planned to spend the week on vacation in Florida, recharging his batteries after the campaign. Instead, with results being challenged and Trump yet to concede, he was pressed into service.
On Friday evening, he was due to appear behind closed doors at the Council for National Policy, where he was expected to outline the rationale for fighting on and outline the president’s achievements, according to an administration official familiar with the remarks.
The result is a careful balancing act for a figure who might by now have begun quietly plotting his own course back to the White House in 2024, according to Pence biographer and Washington correspondent for Business Insider Tom LoBianco.
He said: “Pence really faces the same dilemma every other likely 2024 GOP contender faces: Do you fall in line with Trump or do fairly basic things like acknowledge the election results?”
“It’s trickier for Pence than others, like Sen. Tom Cotton or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, because people ask more questions when a vice president disappears from public sight for days at a time.”
The result has been a schedule of appearances that kept him on message but away from awkward questions.
That course was laid in the early hours of election night. He stood beside the president in the East Room of the White House as Trump declared himself the victim of a “major fraud.”
When called upon to speak, the vice president displayed the balancing skills he has honed during the past four years. He managed to avoid repeating Trump’s claim of victory while sounding like he was repeating the president’s words.
“As the votes continue to be counted, we’re going to remain vigilant, as the president said,” he told the crowd of about 150 people. “We’re going to protect the integrity of the vote.”
On Tuesday, he spoke to Republican senators at the weekly lunch, providing an update on the campaign’s legal challenges while avoiding suggesting the president had won or demanding dissenters toe the line.
“His role has been to assure Republicans that everything is going to be OK,” said a former administration official.
That means sticking to the facts, said the administration official familiar with his speeches, and emphasizing the president’s haul of more than 70 million votes.
“The media does not get to call the election. The American public do,” he said. “The state’s certify the results. And that hasn’t been done yet.”
Meanwhile, campaign fundraiser emails have been sent out in his name.
In one, sent after Georgia announced it would be conducting a recount of presidential votes, he said: “This is a major step in the right direction. I assure you that we will keep fighting until every legal vote for President Trump is counted.”
But several reports have suggested that Pence is among the confidants quietly easing the president toward the exit. Along with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior campaign adviser David Bossie, he was said to be preparing Trump to accept defeat.
Meanwhile, his office has announced that he will be traveling to Georgia next week to campaign on behalf of the state’s two senators. They face an election runoff in a battle that will decide whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate.
The moves come as no surprise to anyone who has watched how Pence has handled the role of vice president through such a tempestuous administration. He has been unfailingly loyal to Trump while quietly slipping out of sight at awkward moments.
That balancing act has seen him woo evangelicals and the fiscally conservative on behalf of a thrice-married adulterer and spendthrift. And at the end of four years, he can turn out thousands of Trump supporters at campaign rallies or lead prayers for the faithful in hushed churches.
Pence watchers say his ambition points in one direction — to run for president in 2024, when he hoped to cash in on his loyalty to Trump.
But that calculation had become harder amid chatter of a Trump run in four years time, pointed out by Costas Panagopoulos, chairman of political science at Northeastern University.
“At some point, however, if not already, Pence’s silence will be perceived as complicity with Trump’s allegations, which may become a political liability for Pence,” he said. “It might be time for Pence to distance himself meaningfully from Trump.”
