Pence defends his record — and his loyalty
As much as Mike Pence likes to project an air of beatific calm, in his memoir, “So Help Me God,” the former vice president writes that even he has his breaking point: “They never gave any thought to the anxiety they were causing the American people, the damage they were doing to our institutions and the credibility of our elections.”
“They” aren’t the rightwing rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6,
2021, erecting a gallows and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Pence is referring to “the collusion crowd,” which kept talking about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
It’s a nifty bit of whataboutism from Pence, who tries his hardest in this memoir to have it all ways at once. Even when he does castigate President Donald Trump supporters who called for his head, he repeatedly describes Trump as “my friend.”
This fondness for someone who egged on the mob that threatened to kill him is an especially degrading form of self-abasement that’s embarrassing to watch.
But Pence has ample experience trying to square the unsquarable. As Trump’s running mate, the devoutly religious Pence lent a sheen of evangelical piety to a reality-TV star who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals; as Trump’s vice president, Pence pivoted from his commitment to laissez-faire conservatism to run defense for Trump’s trade war.
His declarations of fealty were so frequent and fawning that a historian of the vice presidency started calling him “sycophant in chief ” — which made Pence’s refusal to do what Trump wanted him to do on Jan. 6 all the more startling. Here was somebody who for four years had seemed more than willing to go along with most anything Trump wanted. Yet Pence drew the line at a command to not certify the election, even when he knew his own life was in danger. Why?
Pence says it came down to his own reverence for the Constitution. He describes agonizing over his decision in the days leading up to Jan. 6. He knew his role in the certification process was purely ceremonial; the framers would never have vested in one person the power to overturn an entire election.
But he also knew doing his duty “would be hurtful to my friend.” The bulk of “So Help Me God” is given to tracing his relationship with Trump, much of it in minute yet obfuscating detail. At around 500 pages, Pence’s book, like other memoirs by establishment Republicans who threw their lot in with the Trump administration, is exceedingly long — perhaps because he realizes he has a lot of explaining to do.
His explanations are little more than self-serving spin. Despite some complaints about Trump’s “reckless words” on Jan. 6, he suggests Trump was pushed to the brink by others. (Pence even blames the anti-Trump Lincoln Project as well as Democrats for “trying to goad me into doing less than my duty so as not to offend the president.”) Trump is otherwise depicted as someone unfailingly dedicated to the highest office. Any scandal is a nothingburger cooked up by “the woke left” and “the media.”
Trump could say all kinds of weird, aggressive things, but Pence presents this coarse rhetoric as part of a grand strategy. He was playing good cop to Trump’s bad cop: “I was prepared to deliver a firm message in my low-key manner. It was Trump’s job to bring the thunder.”
A chapter on COVID19 gets especially creative. Trump’s bumbling, combative COVID-19 briefings are depicted as wonderfully comforting, not utterly confounding: “There was a method to the way he handled the briefings I think he felt that seeing him and the press argue was in some way reassuring to the American people that life was going on.”
Pence, who presided over the White House’s troubled coronavirus task force, is relentlessly upbeat, despite a pandemic death toll of more than 377,000 Americans by the end of 2020.
“I know we saved millions of lives,” he insists. “The nightmare scenarios facing our health care system never came to pass. Only in America.”
Pence sounds supremely confident for someone teetering on the edge of political oblivion when Trump picked him as his running mate. Pence was running for his second term as governor of Indiana; his approval rating had been tanking, even among the state’s Republicans, but he states, “My reelection was all but assured.”
Besides, he says, everything is part of God’s plan.
“I believe that Providence put President Trump behind that desk,” he writes. “You know,” he recalls telling Trump, “I believe God put me next to you to help you become successful.”
And Trump was successful, in Pence’s calculations, installing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Pence also reports that he had a hand in hiring a number of high-level officials, including the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. He doesn’t mention that many of the people he helped bring to the White House had ties to the Koch family and that, as Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker, a steady stream of Koch money has long buoyed his career.
But the Kochs have been a frequent target of Trump’s ire, and part of what makes “So Help Me God” such a strange document is how it reflects Pence’s attempts to do two wildly incommensurate things: state how “angry” he was about the rioters of Jan. 6 while trying not to alienate Trump’s supporters, many of whom cling to the myth that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
He keeps gesturing vaguely at “voting irregularities,” and maintains that the Republican members of Congress who objected to the electoral count were doing the right thing. Between November 2020 and Jan. 6, Pence felt heartened by Trump’s lawsuits to overturn the election.
Amid so much tortured rationalization, the most obvious conclusion to draw from “So Help Me God” is that Pence continues to have political — perhaps presidential — ambitions and so finds himself in a bit of a pickle. If he had refused to certify the vote, he would forever be seen as Trump’s lackey. But since he did certify the election, he has to find a way to placate the Trump supporters he’ll need, especially because his own political inclinations — extreme religiosity and favoring corporate interests — aren’t that appealing to the American public.