Imagine the reaction if Vice President Kamala Harris declared that, having worked with him up close, she could no longer back President Joe Biden. It would almost certainly mean the end of his campaign. Yet when former Vice President Mike Pence says the same thing about former President Donald Trump, it makes no difference. No difference, that is, to Trump. For Pence himself, it means a new outburst of deranged abuse from MAGA loudmouths.
“Pence’s explicit and vocal refusal to endorse his old boss is a sign of his moral turpitude,” declares Josiah Lippincott in the Trumpster house journal American Greatness. Never mind that the courteous Indianan refused to endorse Biden. The fact of not falling in behind the Supreme Leader means, according to AG, that he supports “transgender surgery for minors, open borders, endless foreign wars, and BLM terrorism in American cities.”
No aspect of MAGA is creepier than this personality cult and the associated obsession with loyalty and treason. “The Judas Iscariots of the American Right need to understand that their betrayal comes at a cost. Excommunication is not enough. Their treachery deserves relentless psychic pain,” writes Lippincott in language that, anywhere else, would come across as parody but which has become standard Trumpster vernacular. “The conservative movement needs to cleanse itself of backstabbers, cowards, and leftists. Purification precedes victory!”
You have to pinch yourself to recall whom this apocalyptic rhetoric is aimed at. Mike Pence is, by any definition, a solid conservative. He is pro-Constitution, pro-life, and pro-guns. The NRA gave him a gold-plated rating. As governor, he delivered the largest tax cut in Indiana’s history. In Congress, he joined the Tea Party Caucus.
He is also a man of obvious personal decency. Oddly enough, I suspect this is why Trump wanted him as a running mate in 2016. Dimly aware that his own character flaws were a potential obstacle, the Donald was looking for someone who would deliver the Christian vote and then do as he was told.
For a while, it worked. Pence’s simple piety allowed religious voters to swallow their doubts about Trump — this, you understand, was back in the days when Republicans cared about character. And, for a long time, Pence was too much of a gentleman to criticize his boss.
But there was a line he was not prepared to cross. On Jan. 6, 2021, he did not just refuse to go along with the putsch in the Capitol; he overruled the attempts to whisk him from the building for his own safety, sensing that, if he deserted his post, mischief might follow.
The rage that MAGA has directed at Pence since that day is telling in two ways. First, it makes a nonsense of the idea that the evenements of Jan. 6 were a kind of high-spirited lark that got out of control, that calling it a “coup” is over-the-top leftist hysteria, or that the sentences handed down to the insurrectionist are excessive. If Trump and his acolytes were not deadly serious about overturning the election, why their animus against Pence?
Second, it shows how far the rest of the Republican Party has fallen that Pence’s behavior should be seen as in any way brave or unusual. I don’t mean to downplay his actions on that day, but standing by your oath of office should be an entry-level requirement for any politician. Withdrawing your support from a presidential candidate who has expressly rejected democracy, even if that candidate were otherwise a man of impeccable modesty, civility, and wisdom, ought to go without saying.
Instead, Pence was almost alone among senior GOP figures in telling the truth and, in consequence, he dropped out of the primaries, struggling to get above 4% support.
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Now he stands like some leftover from a more chivalrous age, a white-and-gold uniformed Tsarist officer among the breadlines of Stalin’s Russia, except that the age he represents was only eight years ago. Many of the people now demanding that the rest of us contract out our opinions to the whims of a self-absorbed bully who used, until very recently, to believe in the things that Pence does — free markets, limited government, the rule of law.
That, of course, is what is behind the invective. Not a sense that Pence is any kind of threat. We saw that in the primaries. Nor yet a sense that he is dishonorable or malevolent. No, the fury directed against him comes precisely from an uncomfortable awareness that the born-again Christian means what he says about standards in public life. He is sticking to the views about the importance of character that most Republicans professed before 2016. No wonder they detest him. He is their bad conscience.
