No Praise for Pence
Average Reading Time: 3 minutes
Peter Eisner
Mike Pence’s last-minute decision on January 6, 2021 to tell trump the truth – he had no power to overturn the election – is not at all praiseworthy. He did the bare minimum to meet the role that he had been given – a figurehead destined to read the words of others – in this case the tally of electors from 50 state legislatures that declared officially that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election.
In the days between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, Pence was as guilty as the rest of the trumpites, gutlessly allowing fraud and lies to fester. He was protecting no one but himself – he sees himself as part of a divine plan to be the president of a glorious godly state on a hill. His mantra, “I am a Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order.” Rightly so – he neglects to mention what must come first, that he is an American.
He might deserve praise if he had called a news conference at any moment and looked into the camera, into the eyes of Americans, and apologized – he had been an accessory to a monster for four years.
Yes, he read the words himself on January 6, Biden had won, trump had lost, after Pence had ducked for cover with his family and others in the Congress while members of a pre-planned insurrection shouting that they would hang him. This was not enough impetus for Michael Richard Pence to acknowledge that donald trump is a psychopath representing a clear and present danger to the United States. Instead he wrote to Nancy Pelosi that “invoking the 25th Amendment … would set a terrible precedent.”
An analogy for those who would agree with those who say Pence saved democracy in the form of a chronology:
2016 and earlier- Trump all along: I’m going to kill the baby
Pence: Disgusting words, but I could be president
2016 The campaign Others: He’s capable of killing the baby
Pence: God wants me to be president
2017 inauguration trump: Here I go, I’m going to kill the baby
Pence—He is a powerful man, but he’s not really killing the baby. And I could be president.
[Interval, 3 years 11 months of evidence the baby is being poisoned. Pence knows it, can see it.]
2020 November 3.
trump: I win. My job is almost done.
Pence: He’ll be out before he can really kill the baby. I can still be president.
2021 January 6
trump: You know what, Mike, I want YOU to kill the baby with me.
Pence: I’m sorry, mr. president, I cannot. If I did, I could not be president.
A Vice President worthy of the title: You have not only conspired to murder the baby, you are a murderer. I have the power to remove you now.
This is Mike Pence. Four years of blind fealty and hypocrisy, hiding behind a haircut, a pseudo-pleasant, bland expression, and false humility. All the while, mouthing the extreme garbage about Nancy Pelosi as a socialist, and radical Democrats. He was holding the line to maintain good graces with trump (actually trumpite voters) until finally on the morning of January six he had to finally say that he had no power to change the vote. He behaved, and still behaves as the hypocrite he is.
Michael D'Antonio and I wrote about his aspirations and his weakness, amoral governance and extremism in The Shadow President. Pence and his ilk should be consigned to ignominy, and he deserves no more than a job working for Jimmy McGill, squeezing blobs of dough at a nameless Cinnabon in a mall I will never visit. Jimmy and his alter ego, Saul Goodman, had more of a sense of right and wrong than Michael Richard Pence has ever shown.