The Specter of Mike Pence

You can’t blame Mike Pence for wanting to keep his head down in this presidential election, given that he nearly had his head in a noose after the last one.

“I’m staying out of this race,” Pence said plaintively—more plaintively even than usual—in a rare interview with Lyndsay Keith on something called Merit Street Media (founded, apparently, by Dr. Phil). Pence sat stiffly, and his voice was hushed and dramatic, as it typically is. He was repeating what he has said before: that he could not support Donald Trump after everything the former president had done, and that he could never back Kamala Harris, either, because of what he holds sacred—namely “the sanctity of life,” which is the “calling of our time.”

“I’ve made it clear I won’t be endorsing,” he reiterated. “How I vote, I will keep to myself.”

But it’s not so simple for Pence. He can try to opt out, but his ordeal inevitably makes him an inescapable figure in this cliff-hanger for American democracy.

At so many turns, his absence has spoken louder than his presence ever could. He is a reminder of Trump’s abject indecency, the former president’s pitiless trampling of norms and the consequence-free zone afforded him by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court.

[Read: How Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court]

“Well, it’s a shame,” Trump said in a recent interview, in an answer to a question about Pence. He conveyed not a speck of regret about Pence, only grievance, as he does. Trump started talking about January 6, 2021, that most fateful day of choosing for his most slavishly devoted of deputies. No one did complete submission to Trump like Pence did—right up until he chose fealty to the Constitution over the wishes of “my president,” as Pence used to refer to Trump (also: “this extraordinary man,” paragon of “broad-shouldered leadership”). “He couldn’t cross the line of doing what was right,” Trump lamented. He also allowed that Pence was a “good man.” They’d had a “very good relationship.” In the end, though, Pence lacked the “courage” and “stamina” to do Trump’s ultimate bidding—for which many thought he should pay the ultimate price.

“So what?” Trump was saying in the Oval Office while rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol. This latest detail was dropped into the delirium bowl by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent court filing in the January 6 case. In a rational world, this would be a bombshell—another example of Trump’s callous dereliction, his willingness to leave his deputy to a hanging mob of his own supporters.

But “so what?” pretty much summed up Americans’ response to this latest October non-surprise.

“So what” about Mike Pence? He can’t help but remain—the specter of him, if not the man himself. “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Tim Walz said, taunting his counterpart, J. D. Vance, in their debate.

Democrats like to point out that even Trump’s own vice president won’t support him. Remarkable, right? It should be, yes—it should speak volumes about Trump. Except: So what? Republican voters keep speaking their own volumes about Trump and keep nominating him. They keep proving, if more proof was needed, that Trump is a special case.

From the start, it was a bit of a mystery with Pence: how this most ostentatiously virtuous of Christians could affix himself to one of the most vulgar creatures ever to soil our public stage. Sure, ambition, opportunism, a mansion and a big plane—great. But how did Pence even get past, say, the Access Hollywood tape in 2016? His approach was essentially to swallow everything—all of the cruelty, crassness, and chaos from Trump—in the belief that this presidency would be a boon to the far-right policies that Pence had spent decades yearning for. He went along to get what he needed and to keep the peace with the boss, until he no longer could.

“Pence is always going to occupy this complex, almost unfathomable place,” the presidential historian Ted Widmer of the City University of New York told me. A speechwriter in the Clinton White House, Widmer has written several books on American democracy, leaders, and campaigns. He says that by standing firm against Trump on January 6, Pence ensured himself a kind of historical purgatory. “Nobody was as true blue of a Republican or loyal vice president as Pence was,” Widmer said. “Everything could have turned out so perfectly for him.” His refusal to help Trump thwart the will of American voters “might buy Pence whatever the historian’s version of a mulligan is,” Widmer told me. “But it is also the same thing that was unforgivable in Trump’s moral universe.”

Pence rarely talks about the day that will always define him. If it comes up, he prefers to frame January 6 as “a disagreement” that he had with Trump over what authority a vice president had (or clearly did not have) to challenge the certification of Electoral College votes. In the end, he declared his allegiance to an even higher authority than Trump. “I’ve always said that the safest place in the world is to be at the center of God’s will,” Pence said.

He likes to remind people that he and Trump spoke several times in the final, post-insurrection days of their administration. “We parted amicably,” he said in the Merit Street Media interview, adding that Trump “told me in the Oval Office with many present that he thought I’d done a great job.” Also, Pence said, Trump thanked him on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base. And they’d spoken often by phone in the days after he left office.

“But there was something in the early days of the spring of 2021 where he seemed to shift back,” Pence told Keith. Pence said he then concluded that, “like the Bible says, at some point, you’ve just got to wipe the dust off your feet and go your own separate ways.”

In so much as Pence is willing to discuss his breakup with Trump, he tends to focus on how the former president has abandoned the conservative positions that they championed in office. This particularly relates to abortion, but extends to a broader betrayal: “I’ve literally seen him walking away from strong American leadership on the world stage. I’ve seen him marginalize the right to life, and even parrot Democrats when it comes to the crisis facing our children and grandchildren in the National Debt,” Pence told Keith.

“When you now see Trump separating from Pence, it’s not just [Trump] going back to being pro-abortion,” Marc Short, Pence’s former vice-presidential chief of staff, who remains one of Pence’s closest advisers and confidants, told me. “It’s Trump moving away from the free-trader Mike Pence, who is also anti-tax and anti-tariff, and who would not abandon Ukraine.”

[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]

As for January 6, it has become something of a gateway drug. If Trump can be forgiven for that, what would his supporters not tolerate? Whether or not he ever gets convicted for it, Trump’s ability to overcome that day politically has come to represent its own get-out-of-jail-free card. What’s a little wobbliness on abortion?

“Once Republicans decide to condone Trump going the wrong way on the rule of law,” Short said, it becomes possible to rationalize all manner of ideological trespass. “I do think for a lot of people, once you’ve crossed that bridge, set aside your oath to the Constitution,” Short told me—“when you have violated what you know to be true—you figure that you might as well go all in.”

Friends of Pence say that many Republicans, including Trump supporters, will often express support for him. They tell him he is a good man, and they respect what he did, and that it’s unfair how he’s been treated. But these conversations almost always happen in private. They would never say as much in public—for fear, of course, of crossing Trump.

Where does that leave Pence, a Christian conservative in a GOP now governed by one man’s impulses? In powerful circles of the party, Pence remains a pariah. “Judas Pence is a dead man walking with MAGA,” Steve Bannon told The New York Times in June. If Trump wins, maybe he softens and absolves his former vice president, who did nearly everything he asked. If nothing else, Pence will endure as the cautionary scoundrel of the Trump age: one who was loyal to the bitter end, and barely lived to tell about it.