Suddenly, Mike Pence is acting ‘brand new’
What a difference an indictment makes. Ever since the Justice Department charged Donald Trump with four criminal counts related to his attempts to overturn his historic loss in the 2020 presidential election, Mike Pence has been a man with his tongue untied when it comes to dragging his ex-boss.
“Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear,” Pence, a Republican presidential candidate, told reporters at the Indiana State Fair on Aug. 2. “And while I made my case to him, with what I understood my oath of the Constitution to require, the president ultimately continued to demand that I choose him over the Constitution.”
“Itching ears” comes from the Bible: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.”
Perhaps it was being on his home turf that emboldened Pence. Perhaps it was the timing — on the day before Trump was arrested and arraigned in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on his third indictment in four months. But in interviews and in the campaign stops, the former vice president seemed to be acting “brand new.”
That’s an old expression that refers to someone suddenly behaving in an unrecognizable manner. Lagging badly in the polls, Pence wants to distinguish himself from most of his fellow presidential candidates who won’t publicly criticize the lying, indictment-prone Trump.
But that’s not easy for Pence. Everywhere he goes, he’s confronted by Trump followers claiming that if he had done what they wrongly consider the right thing, Trump would be in the White House today. Forget that Pence had no constitutional authority to do anything other than what he did on Jan. 6 — certify Biden’s win in the 2020 election. Just try, as Pence has, convincing the former president’s angry supporters with that fact.
During a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, Pence was greeted with a familiar soundtrack that has followed him for more than two years: heckling.
“Why did you sell out the people? Why didn’t you stay? Why didn’t you uphold the Constitution, sir?” one man insistently asked Pence. Visibly annoyed, he snapped, “I upheld the Constitution. Read it!” As Pence walked away for a photo with children, another man barked, “You sold the people out. You sold them out. You sold out all these kids, too!”
Pence later said, “I really do believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. And anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”
None of this should obscure the many ways that the brand-new Pence is exactly like the terrible old Pence. He offered spooky warnings about the “extreme agenda” of “leftists” in a campaign video for Ohio Republicans’ failed bid for a state constitutional change that would have targeted abortion rights.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ organization, called Pence “dangerously out of step with the average American’s views on freedom and equality,” adding, ”His potential presidency would create devastating consequences for the safety of the LGBTQ+ community and the ability of our people to live as full members of society.”
In short, Pence should be right-wing catnip. And in any other scenario, he would likely be a frontrunner for the GOP nomination. But the Trump base that every candidate is trying to court views Pence as a traitor, and his dismal poll numbers show it. In April, he even got booed at a National Rifle Association convention — in his home state.
According to the book “American Carnage” by journalist Tim Alberta, Trump plucked Pence, then skidding toward ignominy as Indiana’s very unpopular governor, to be his running mate in 2016 because “he says nice things about me.” (Yes, the bar was that low.) And Pence dutifully served Trump through the worst presidency in modern American history.
But because Trump values loyalty above all else — and his followers value Trump above all else — Pence can’t make much of a dent with the majority of Republican voters who still believe that the
2020 election was stolen from the former president, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Pence has qualified for the first Republican debate on Aug. 23, although it’s still unclear if Trump will participate. Yet even with his brand-new bluster, this is already undebatable: To paraphrase another line from the Bible, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Mike Pence to win the Republican nomination for president.