If there’s one thing the televised House select committee hearings have brought out, it’s the tension between Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and their strained relationship was the focus of Thursday’s hearing, Raw Story [1] reports.
Pence somehow found his backbone and refused to carry out Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. According to witnesses, this led Trump to agree with his crazed mob of supporters that maybe Pence should have been hanged. Despite this, Trump has had the audacity to invite his former Vice President to Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post [2] reports.
“Pence has not spoken to Trump in more than a year and rebuffed initial invitations to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, advisers said,” per The Post. “A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.”
I’m no fan of Mike Pence, but can anyone blame the man for ignoring Trump after he said something this awful? I’d leave him twisting in the wind, I would.
Pence has told others he’s considering running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Polling numbers, however, don’t paint a particularly positive picture here and show Pence trailing behind Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Pence has also told donors that while he supported Trump, he didn’t have the power to subvert Joe Biden’s election win.
“He’s been asked in a few places here and there what his take is on it, and he generally just said, ‘The Vice President has a ceremonial role there. I had no constitutional authority to do that,'” said South Carolina state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, who has coordinated Pence’s visits to his state. “We’ve been at eight events together, and of the eight events we’ve been at, it’s maybe come up four times. It hasn’t been a dominant topic.”
Advisors do, however, note that Trump hasn’t subjected Pence to the same vitriol he seems to have saved up for former attorney general Bill Barr or former defense secretary Mark Esper. And while Pence may not be showing up at Mar-a-Lago anytime soon, he’s still proud of his and Trump’s shared agenda.
“Mike Pence clearly delineates between being proud of the policies he helped deliver for those four years, and he sees that as separate from what he was asked and pressured to do post-election,” said GOP operative Tom Phillips. “He is proud of the policies he helped implement and he’s proud of what he did in that period after the election. He separates those things.”
By refusing to do Trump’s bidding, Pence showed that he has a backbone. If he weren’t so durned homophobic [3] I might even actually like him. But he is so I don’t.