A thought experiment: You have two people seated in front of you of whom you must ask to provide you with information that may cast them in a slightly negative light, but whose truthful answer will very likely save your life. If they lie or distort the information they have in order to protect their reputation, you will probably die. They won’t, but they will have to live with the moral consequences of their decision for the rest of their lives.
These two people are Donald Trump and his former vice-president, Mike Pence. And they give you completely different information on the subject at hand.
So, the question: Which person would you be inclined to believe?
Followed by: How many seconds/minutes would it take you to arrive at that decision?
What are the factors that would drive your evaluation?
Why aren’t we paying more attention to this remarkable, utterly flabbergasting story, one so Shakespearean in its treachery that even the Bard himself might have steered clear for its seeming improbability?
On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “extremely uncertain” and 10 being “extremely certain,” how certain would you be that you were making the right choice?
And finally: Why aren’t the media, Republican and Independent voters paying far more attention than they currently are to the unprecedented situation of a former vice president announcing he cannot, in good conscience, endorse his former mate’s candidacy against the Democratic nominee?
This despite Pence continuing to pursue, via his nonprofit “Advancing American Freedom” foundation, principles and policies based on his opinion that, “Our values are under attack by the radical Left and liberal media” and its “policy agenda (that) threatens to destroy our standing in the world.”
If Mr. Pence feels that strongly about the opposition party’s “agenda” to essentially destroy the country he professes to love, why on earth is he not endorsing the president he so devotedly served and who rhetorically, at least, embraces identical views on the threat facing our country?
“It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Pence told Fox News in an interview last spring.
“No surprise?”
Sure, it would be a rare human being who would still see fit to endorse a candidate who had been perfectly content to see him killed for the candidate’s own dark purposes following a failed election effort. On the other hand, we should not minimize the utterly shocking specter of a vice president refusing to endorse the president and two-time running mate he served so doggedly throughout their administration and 2020 campaign.
The fact that most all of the country has moved on from that fact is but one of the extremely troublesome hallmarks of this era.
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Now, about that matter of then-President Trump standing aside after rioters at the January 6, 2021 insurrection had built a gallows on the Capitol grounds before repeatedly chanting over the coming hours, “Hang Mike Pence!”
Aware of these facts, Trump tweeted the following more than half an hour after rioters had broken through to the Senate chambers and sent Pence and congressional leadership fleeing for their lives as chaos engulfed the entire Capitol: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
It should not have been surprising to anyone when the rioters took that as license to do as they pleased should they have the good fortune of finding the vice president before he was hustled away by an anxious Secret Service detail.
It’s worth noting (and reminding ourselves!) a heavily annotated timeline of the events transpiring then, taken from the U.S. House Select Committee investigating January 6, courtesy of Wikipedia:
“Similarly, the committee wrote in its final report: ‘Immediately after this tweet, the crowds both inside and outside of the Capitol building violently surged forward. Outside the building, within ten minutes thousands of rioters overran the line on the west side of the Capitol that was being held by the Metropolitan Police Force’s Civil Disturbance Unit, the first time in history of the DC Metro Police that such a security line had ever been broken. Within an hour after this tweet, (Trump lawyer) Pat Cipollone complained to (Trump Chief-of-Staff) Mark Meadows that ‘we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the Vice President to be [fucking] hung.’ Meadows suggested that there was nothing to do, given that Trump ‘thinks Mike deserves it.’ According to Trump aide Nick Luna, when Trump was told that Pence had to be moved for his safety, Trump responded: ‘So what?'”
Reading and thinking about this account after having watched every minute of the insurrection with bated breath nearly four years ago, I find myself similarly gobsmacked and nearly breathless again in revisiting the tension and horror of that day.
A sitting president was willing to see his vice president hung from the gallows within earshot of the White House and now that person is in position to be president again? How is that possible? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF COUNTRY ARE WE LIVING IN???
Trump, of course, disputes many details of the event, but the television and phone logs and tweets and frantic communications among his staff and between law enforcement agencies in those dark hours of our nation’s history stand impervious to the relentless lies, exaggerations and distortions that are his life’s stock-in-trade.
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Pence is of course far from the only politician whose pre-Trump career saw him playing more or less between the lines of the institutional politics that every democracy depends on to sustain itself. The list of cabinet and other staff who at least somewhat selflessly joined the Trump administration in hope of tempering his more erratic impulses and lending a veneer of experience and competence to his administration but who now oppose him is a lengthy one.
A partial list:
• Chief of Staff John Kelly • Defense Secretary James Mattis
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions • Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
• Homeland Security Secretary Kirtsjen Nielsen • National Intelligence Director Dan Coats
• FBI Director James Comey • National Security Adviser John Bolton
• National Security Aide Alexander Vindaman, • Defense Secretary Mark Esper
• Cyber Security Director Chris Krebs • EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland
• Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan • Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn
Many of them were, in a true sense, “the adults in the room,” whose best intentions came only to ruin, and who left the administration amidst various states of acrimony, desperation and despair that they could any longer influence the course of the country they had taken an oath to serve.
None of them, however, with quite the story Pence lived to tell about having a veritable bounty placed on his head by the most powerful person in the world, and one he had served with what amounted to near religious devotion as Defender-in-Chief of his former boss’s every decision and behavior.
Why aren’t we paying more attention to this remarkable, utterly flabbergasting story, one so Shakespearean in its treachery that even the Bard himself might have steered clear for its seeming improbability?
Now, the prime mover in that treachery is once again poised to recapture the office he used to hold in order to recommence his dark deeds.
The fact that much of the voting public seems unconcerned and even enthused about that prospect is a sad and terrifying spectacle. Equally dismaying is the largely deafening silence around the harrowing spectacle of a president perfectly willing to see his vice president die because he could not reclaim an office he had no legal or moral right to pursue.
What does it say about our country that such a man can once again be knocking on the door of the same presidency he has so disgraced?
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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.
Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Mike Pence headshot by Thomas Hawk, San Francisco, California https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/
Trump muzzled by Alan Davey, Portland, Oregon https://www.flickr.com/photos/adavey/
Capitol gallows/committee hearing from the public domain
Only hypocrites wade the muddy waters (not the Blues singer) of the Republican Party. They’re a sight to see. They sit on the banks of the river admiring their leader, the rather plump Trump. Get this. Trump called Ted Cruz’s wife ugly and even hinted at the possibility that his father was involved in some way with the assassination of President Kennedy. What was Cruz’s response? He smeared his lipstick on Trump’s derriere and belted out a few hallelujahs from Handel’s “Messiah.” On the night of January 6th, Mitch McConnell referred to Trump’s actions that afternoon as impeccably impeachable. So, what does the KY Colonel now do? He licks the greasy bucket, downs several mint juleps, and compares Trump’s emergence to that of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. J.D. Vance dubbed Trump America’s Hitler. Now, this “hillbilly” is looking a lot like Goebbels. Not too many moons ago, Marco Rubio mocked Trump saying, “Trump wanted a full-length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet. He then added, “He’s flying around on Hair Force One.” Today, Lil Mario is the main rapper in the Trump fan club. In a moment of uncommon clarity, Lindsey Graham called Trump a fucking idiot. On the eve of this year’s Republican Convention, he praised Trump to no end. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him introduce a “Make Trump the 5th on Rushmore” bill in the Senate. In 2016, after Hillary conceded the election, Trump asked one of his campaign managers what was the main reason for his victory. Without hesitation, his advisor said, “Thank God for suburban women.” Trump gleefully piggybacked, “Thank God for my strumpets.” I may have taken a little liberty with the truth, but you get the idea…If Trump wins, we’re up the proverbial creek without an oar, life jacket or VISA card.
A veritable rogue’s gallery for sure, Robert, and the politicians all much worse than the voters, because they know better and have seen how the Trump sausage is made (and what the ingredients are…). But back to Pence for a minute: What do Rubio, McConnell, Graham et al say when they run into him at conferences & such? “Nice to see your neck still free of rope burns, Mike!” ?? How do they face him? How do they face themselves??
I doubt if Pence will ever run into the likes of those Republicans who have sold their soul to the Orange One. If he does happen to bump into his former friends, he needs to hand each of them a poster of “Hang ‘Em High”, a copy of Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” and a “High Noon” DVD.