Mike Pence had anointed Donald Trump as God’s leader. He can’t take it back
EVANGELICAL Christians used to care a lot about morality in politics.
Christian leaders besieged Jimmy Carter for giving an interview to Playboy. They called Bill Clinton unfit for office because of his marital infidelity and other failings.
Then Donald Trump carried out a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, defeated Hillary Clinton and became president. Suddenly, evangelical leaders saw fit to emphasise parts of the Bible focusing on forgiveness and imperfect leaders. Look, they rationalised, it’s a modern King David!
No-one played a greater role than Mike Pence in anointing the “grab them by the p****” president as God’s chosen leader. As McKay Coppins wrote in a 2018 profile in The Atlantic, Pence’s “servant leadership” astounded even those closest to Trump.
“He was our top surrogate by far,” an anonymous senior adviser to Trump told The Atlantic. “He was this mildmannered, uber-Christian guy with a Midwestern accent telling voters, ‘Trump is a good man; I know what’s in his heart’. It was very convincing – you wanted to trust him. You’d be sitting there listening to him and thinking, yeah, maybe Trump is a good man.
Now, more than three years after Trump made Pence a target for an angry mob at the US Capitol capable of killing him, Pence has taken another step away from his “broadshouldered” former boss, telling Fox News: “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.”
The Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last wonders why Pence’s non-endorsement isn’t the biggest story of the upcoming election. “No American vicepresident has ever said that [the] president he served under is unfit to serve,” Last writes. “It is the most devastating possible observation from the most credible source in existence.
“Pence’s refusal to endorse Trump should be part of the context of every single story about this campaign.”
Last argues that Pence acted courageously on January 6, 2021. I agree. But I don’t share Last’s confusion over why no-one cares about Pence withholding his endorsement.
For one thing, Pence still refuses to state the obvious: Trump is a threat to the foundation of America, as well as everyone around him. Pence witnessed that first hand. Nonetheless, Pence is couching his criticism in policy.
“As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt,” Pence told Fox News. “I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life.”
Yes, these are the main problems with Trump. Never mind Trump’s proven capacity for orchestrating domestic terrorism.
Pence invested his ambition and, yes, faith in Trump. He is not yet willing or able to fully cash out.
Those of us who reserve respect for Pence, the person, feel compelled to search for something that isn’t there in his words and actions.
The temptation to ascribe meaning to Pence’s non-endorsement comes from a desire to project our own rooting interests onto a good man who deserves justice for how Trump treated him. Pence is not seeking justice. He continues to serve as a character witness for Trump just as he has since 2016 when he forgave Trump for the infamous “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump joked about groping women.
No-one worked harder to uphold the former president’s righteousness than Pence. Consider a typical Pence stump speech from October 2020.
“In President Donald Trump, you’ve had a leader who’s kept his promises to people of faith like no other in my lifetime,” Pence said in Iowa.
Pence knew who Trump was when he said those words, even if it would be a few more weeks before Trump put Pence’s life in danger.
Pence can’t speak to Trump’s core rottenness now without implicitly criticising his own judgment during the years he stood alongside him, assuring evangelicals that Trump was on their side.