Mike Pence is a moral coward
Mike Pence is a moral coward
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.
Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
This story appeared in the newspaper on January 24, 2021.
Seven hundred and ninety-seven days have passed since January 6, 2021.
Here is how Politico covered Mike Pence speaking before the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, DC, on March 11, 2023. It is obscene.
The Friday after January 6, 2021, then-Vice President Mike Pence sat down for his daily devotions, thumbed his Bible to the New Testament and James 1:19, and read these words: “Be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
Pence wasn’t slow to anger. In fact, he was plenty angry, as he wrote in his 2022 memoir “So Help Me God.” But he was slow to speak. More than two years after those devotions, that still lingering anger over January 6 burst out into the open. In remarks that turned from comedic to biting, Trump’s ever-loyal number 2 broke from his former boss more sharply than any candidate in the GOP field so far.
“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for January 6,” Pence told hundreds of journalists at what is typically a jocular white-tie affair. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Trump was wrong. His reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”
Pence had used similar words to talk about Trump in his book — writing that his former boss’ “reckless words had endangered my family and all those serving at the Capitol.”
[My emphasis added] But his advisers saw the Gridiron dinner as an opportunity not just to echo those sentiments but to amplify them. They also believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists who have given him short shrift in the early 2024 primary.
“This was a different audience for him,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former vice presidential chief of staff and his senior adviser.
Pence world has long believed that the former congressman and Indiana governor could occupy the adult-in-a-room 2024 lane, in that he is uniquely positioned to speak truth to power now that he is free of the constraints of the vice presidency.
Truly, there are no words. The idea that Mike Pence has been released from captivity, and is now able to tell the truth is what is called a “narrative” in Washington, DC. Apparently next to Hanalei (from Puff the Magic Dragon) is a magical world called “PENCE.” Within that world full of believers there is a delusion. It is this: he is singularly the “adult in the room.”