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I can’t find the antacid strong enough to control the rising bilious feeling I get when I see former Vice President Mike Pence aw-shucks his way through receiving an award for courage from the JFK Library. Back in 2021, Pence did what he had to do under the law.

OK, great. Pence withstood pressure from his boss who wanted back then (and still does want) to overthrow the will of the people and stay in office perpetually. Instead of denouncing Trump, he consulted with constitutional scholars and found he had only one legal path. Fine.

My colleague, Michael D’Antonio, and I wrote a book about Pence, The Shadow President, and found him – based on dozens of interviews with people who knew him — to be duplicitous, and, as governor of Indiana, heartless and more extreme right-wing than the right-wing Republicans who ran and still run the state.

Now, benefiting from American amnesia, he tries to use this award to worm his way back into the national dialogue. He, like Jake and Elwood Blues, thinks he is on a mission from God. The Blues brothers were only spreading the gospel of music. Pence is promoting Christian Nationalism and still basks in the Trumpism that gives it space to exist.

Listen now to your 2025 John Fitzgerald Kennedy Profile in Courage. He criticizes but also praises Trump, an American president who says he “doesn’t know” if he must follow the Constitution.

Pence has “great confidence” in Pam Bondi, an empty shell who is helping Trump weaponize and eviscerate the Justice Department in his vengeance tour against anyone who opposes him. And he praises Tom Homan (“a great lawman”) , the cruel head of  ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who cares not a nit about due process, and would imprison judges and other officials who impede brown shirt arrests of immigrants or oppose their disappearances (Argentina-like) to perpetual imprisonment in El Salvador. Pence doesn’t like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though. Because Kennedy with all his fanatical ideas, dares to support abortion rights.

Pence was chosen as vice president back in 2016 to deliver the right-wing evangelical vote for Trump in 2016. He is one of the creators of the worldwide MAGA myth that has left the United States with eroding democracy on the brink of authoritarian rule. He once described Trump as a changed man who had learned to pray. He stood in fealty to Trump that first term, and measured the curtains in the Oval Office for hopes of a future there for himself. His actions now are more of the same.

Courage? Stand up and say that Trump must be impeached and removed from office. Now. I’m not betting on it.