VP goes to wall for Trump, suffers brickbats
JERUSALEM — Sitting directly across the table from Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Vice President Mike Pence’s face had a placid, mask-like quality as Abdullah publicly lit into him over and over for not heeding Arab concerns over the White House decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The king’s voice, polished at Sandhurst and Oxford, quavered slightly as he admonished Pence — sternly calling him “sir” as TV cameras rolled — for ignoring a year’s worth of “continuously voiced” objections to Washington. Vowing to be “candid and frank,” he warned of a “potential major source of instability” for Jordan and the region.
It was a rare face-to-face public rebuke of an American vice president, and a public humiliation that Pence’s boss, President Donald Trump, is unlikely to have sat through so quietly. Pence said later that he and Abdullah “agreed to disagree.”
Pence’s stoic response Sunday in Amman, like the rest of the four-day Middle East tour he wrapped up Tuesday, shows he has honed a unique set of survival skills for serving under a mercurial and vindictive president: Heap double scoops of praise on Trump and his agenda, and be prepared to absorb the uncomfortable criticism of U.S. allies.
It obviously wasn’t as bad as when Vice President Richard Nixon’s car was pelted with rocks and spat upon by anti-American protesters in Caracas, Venezuela, in May 1958. Still, it’s hard to remember a more recent vice president who has pushed the limits of carrying political grudges abroad or endured such public slights and snubs on an overseas trip.
It began when the trip was repeatedly postponed as anger and protests spread across the Middle East over Trump’s Dec. 6 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Pence’s aides billed the three-nation trip as a chance to smooth relations with close allies and to offer support to the region’s Christian minority. But after Trump’s decision, the head of Egypt’s Coptic Church said he would not meet with the vice president, and a planned visit to the West Bank city of Bethlehem was scrapped.
Also scrubbed were any meetings with Palestinians after Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, called for a boycott of Pence’s visit and canceled a meeting. It got worse from there. In Cairo on Saturday, Egyptian President AbdelFattah el-Sisi rebuked him privately and at length, and forced Pence himself to intervene to allow American reporters who had accompanied him on Air Force Two to end a 90minute standoff with Egyptian officials and to cover their meeting.
The headline in Egypt’s state-owned Akhbar alYoum newspaper described Pence as the vice president for “aborting peace.”
On Sunday, Abdullah publicly chastised Pence at the palace luncheon. “Today we have a major challenge to overcome, especially with some of the rising frustrations,” he told the vice president as their aides and wives, Queen Rania and Karen Pence, watched silently.
Abdullah’s “angry message” was a “dire warning that the U.S. was losing its status and risking its national security,” Issam Qadhmani, a columnist with Jordan’s state-owned daily Al Rai, wrote.
On Monday, Pence’s speech to the Israeli parliament was disrupted when lawmakers from Arab Joint List, Israel’s third biggest party, waved placards and shouted in protest — probably a first for a visiting U.S. leader. Thirteen members were forcibly escorted from the chamber after grappling with security staff.
That afternoon, after Congress reached a deal to end the shutdown, Pence said “the Schumer shutdown failed” as he stood beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has relied on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a dependable ally for Israel.
Pence’s team believes the three-nation trip was a diplomatic triumph, one they plan to enhance by visiting up to 10 more countries this year, and can use to bolster his otherwise low-wattage record so far if he ever runs for president. They dismiss the complaints as proof that Trump’s disruptive policy is shaking up hide-bound views that have failed to produce a Middle East peace deal.
Pence won plaudits in Israel — and among evangelical voters who see Pence as their champion — for announcing that the Trump administration would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem next year, not five or six years down the road as the State Department previously had indicated.
And Pence’s visit is likely to go down well with the Oval Office. Time and again, he said how proud he was to represent Trump — not the United States or the American people, as national politicians normally do.
Staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Aleppo, Syria, contributed.