Former Vice President Mike Pence has a book out. That’s the backdrop, the context in which Pence spoke with David Muir on ABC News this week. Pence has a book, and has taken to the airwaves on what we could call his “reputational reclamation tour,” a chance to recast his political persona, to proclaim himself a hero in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Pence, after all, disobeyed Donald Trump and stood up to the rioters by ultimately certifying the election of Joe Biden as president. He did this as the crowds called for his head — literally.
If we are to judge Pence solely on his actions at this moment, we might view him the way he apparently sees himself. But we should not do so. Ignore (for now) Pence’s politics, which I would describe as Christian Nationalist and place him to the right of the pre-Trump Republican establishment. And ignore (again, only for now) his nearly two years of silence, or his complicity in nearly everything put forth by Trump during his four years beside him in the White House. His track record would be enough to disqualify him for higher office — something both his book and the Muir interview hint at.
Instead, let’s drill down into two things Pence said to Muir, one of which made headlines and the other of which was essentially ignored in the press coverage.
This was the key point in the Muir interview:
Muir: In looking back to that moment, do you have any regrets about your own rhetoric? Just two days before January 6th, you were in Georgia, and you said, “we all have our doubts about the election. Come this Wednesday, we'll have our day in Congress. Come this Wednesday, we'll have our day in Congress. We'll hear the objections. We'll hear the evidence. You'll hear the evidence.” Were you feeding the false hope?
Pence: No, not in the least.
Muir: But do you regret the rhetoric? When you look out the window and you see people, and you wrote in your book, these people had been told that the outcome of the election could be changed. You knew the rhetoric that was out there. Were you feeding into it by saying this just two days before the election, “we'll see the evidence. Wednesday will be our day?”
Pence: No, David, not in the least. What I was talking about was that we had a tremendous amount of, not just disappointment, but public concern about irregularities in the election.
Muir continues to press Pence, pointing out that Attorney General Bill Barr had on Dec. 1 declared the election legitimate and that there had not been the kind of widespread fraud Trump was proclaiming — and that, despite this, despite the then-vice president allegedly agreeing with him, Vice President Pence was saying publican that “we'll have our day?”
Pence responds with a cliche: — “hindsight is always 20/20” — and then adds that he “never imagined the violence that would ensue.” Trumps “words were reckless and his actions were reckless,” he says, and they “endangered me and my family and everyone at the capitol building.”
But Trump was more than reckless on Jan. 6. His behavior that day was intentional. He rallied his supporters, revved them into a lather, and then gave them specific instructions. He had been beating the “Big Lie” drum for two months and now saw an opportunity to maintain power by force. And Pence had been complicit for much of that period — and for Trump’s entire four-year term, which is the context in which Jan. 6 took place.
Trump began his presidency by claiming fraud, by arguing that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote advantage in 2016 was attained by encouraging undocumented immigrants to illegally cast ballots. Before this, during his debates with Clinton before the election, he refused to say he’d support the outcome if he lost.
He then spent four years ginning up conspiracies about immigrants, Black Lives Matter protesters, winking and nodding to extremist groups, and building a base steeped in a cult of personality.
Pence was with him throughout, attempting to soften the rhetoric, but refusing to distance himself from any of it. After the Unite the Right rallies in 2017, when a counter protester was killed and Trump declared “there are good people on both sides,” Pence condemned hate but also said, “I stand with the president.”
Pence has said little about Jan. 6 in the last two years, even as he toured college campuses earlier this year sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group. Those speeches were billed as a defense of speech freedoms, but were really attacks on “wokeness” as defined by the right. And they ignored Jan. 6.
Pence is nothing if not a politician. He has ambitions, possibly for the White House — he refused to answer Muir’s questions about this, but the publication of his book and his press tour certainly offer ammo for the political rumor mill. He crossed Trump at a precipitous moment, but cannot afford to completely toss him under the bus, not without angering what is now his party’s base, because Pence has no base of his own. He is just one of many religious extremists in his party and, despite what the national media is saying about Trump’s fading hopes at the moment, that is not going to be enough.