The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
How Pence stood up to the mob
Thursday was like reverse conversion therapy. By 4 p.m. I was gay for Mike Pence.
That may not be exactly the affirmation he’s looking for, but I can’t help what I feel.
And that’s the power of narrative.
Sign up to get Colin’s newsletter delivered to your inbox, for free.
Thursday’s hearing before the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack was like a “Game of Thrones” episode, a chalice filled to the brim with poison, perfidy, profanity and pusillanimity.
But one man rose above the swamp of villainy and self-seeing. We already knew that Vice President Mike Pence didn’t cave to pressure from Donald Trump and his allies to decertify legitimate election results. We just didn’t know how freaking metal he was about the whole thing.
We had seen the clip of Pence and his family being hustled downstairs to a secure location along with (gulp) the Air Force guy with the nuclear football. We found out Thursday that the cop-clubbing rioters — some of whom had declared their intent to harm or possibly hang Pence — were about 40 feet away at one point.
Thursday the committee shared a shot of Pence down in the shadowy building bowels, standing near a loading dock while he did stuff on his phone.
Witness testimony told us Pence was checking on the welfare other government officials and doing whatever he could to keep government operations — especially the vote certification — running.
His Secret Service detail started hustling people into bulletproof vehicles. Greg Jacob, counsel to the vice president, said he and other staffers had settled into their seats for the fast ride to safety when they realized somebody was still standing outside.
Pence wasn’t going anywhere. He told the agent in charge he would not let the world see an American vice president fleeing from the scene of an embattled democracy. He was going to stay and restart the process at the earliest opportunity. Mike Pence, you badass! Of course, Pence appeared to walk even taller against a backdrop of scampering weasels.
Pence wasn’t going anywhere. He told the agent in charge he would not let the world see an American vice president fleeing from the scene of an embattled democracy. He was going to stay and restart the process at the earliest opportunity.
One of those weasels was Donald Trump. The committee nailed down the evidence of Trump riling up the crowd against Pence (and then ducking out), of Trump hate-tweeting Pence minutes after learning the Capitol had been breached and mayhem had ensued, of Trump never checking in with Pence when the latter’s safety was in doubt.
His matching bookend weasel was John Eastman, a formerly obscure lawyer who emerged from academia to become the president’s End Times consiglieri. Eastman concocted a strategy (if it’s worthy of that name) wherein Pence would either nullify the results or delay certification for 10 days.
Neither of those moves would have been legal, and by the end of Thursday — thanks again to the likeable Jacob — it seemed pretty clear that Trump and Eastman both knew it.
After the mob, incited by Eastman’s ideas and Trump’s big mouth, finally dispersed, leaving blood and bodies in its wake, Eastman pressed the idea of taking one last shot at destabilizing the election with both Trump staffers and with Jacob, who was still adjusting to the idea that he was not about to be torn limb-from-limb by Proud Boys.
Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified about his response: “I said to (Eastman), ‘Are you out of your effing mind? I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: Orderly transition ... Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.’ And then I hung up on him.”
The message seeped into Eastman’s fevered brain. He lawyered up and took the Fifth more than 100 times when deposed. Best of all, he shot an email to Rudy Giuliani saying, “I’ve decided I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.” Reader, he was not.
It’s not immediately clear whom to praise for the committee’s unusually keen understanding of the current media moment, but somebody deduced that getting the story of Jan. 6 out there would require a collage approach to television in which live testimony is fused with kicky pieces of tape and magnified pull quotes flashed onto the screen.
The result is something that is compulsively watchable in real time and can be endlessly repurposed as Instagram clips and GIFs and memes and TikToks.
California Congressman Peter Aguilar, who led the questioning, also made sure another point was driven home. Jacob and — in a recorded clip, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short — talked about the role their faith played in guiding them through the crisis. We heard about prayers and Bible verses exchanged among Pence and his staff.
This was aimed straight at rank-and-file American conservatives. There were some people praying to God and quoting from Daniel and Timothy while they stood, chests out, against a rising tide of barbarians. There was another guy sitting safely in his office, dreaming about Jean Claude Van Damme movies and about grabbing the p-word.
Speaking of that, Trump, the cowering weasel, had the audacity to call Pence, the Christian warrior, “a pword,” in a phone call, according to Trump’s daughter’s chief of staff.
It should be pretty simple to pick a side.