Here is a theory I cannot test, but which I believe to be true:
If Mike Pence were to walk through the crowd at a Donald Trump rally—for instance, the recent giant event where 50,000 Trump supporters swamped the town of Pickens, South Carolina—he would need a security detail. He would not be safe without one, and he might not be safe with one either. In fact, I have a hard time believing that any Secret Service team would agree to go along with such an excursion. Enough Trump supporters hate Pence that much.
By contrast, I believe Pence could safely walk through the crowd at a Joe Biden event—like his June 17 rally in Philadelphia—without any security. Some Biden supporters might make snide comments, but it seems equally possible that others might shake his hand and thank him for saving the republic on January 6, 2021.
Not to belabor the obvious, but, for Pence, this is a problem. Because Pence is running for president as a Republican.
Yet for the country, this isn’t just a problem; it’s an almost biblical tragedy. Mike Pence is the man who told his tribe the truth. They turned on him for it. And now, having finally found the courage to leave, he’s desperate for acceptance among them once again.
For more than a quarter century, Pence was a dutiful and committed conservative. He started in talk radio, where his brand was “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” On his third try, he got himself elected to the House of Representatives, where he was happy to buck the Republican Party by opposing George W. Bush on two of his big legislative achievements—No Child Left Behind and Medicare expansion—both of which Pence believed violated his commitment to certain small-government conservative principles. But Republicans forgave these heresies. Pence ascended to the No. 3 position in House GOP leadership.
From the House, Pence vaulted to the Indiana governor’s mansion and then, finally, onto a presidential ticket as Trump’s running mate. You know how that went: For four years, Pence defended everything Trump did and said. Behind the scenes, he tried to be the grown-up in the room. A fly camped out on his head on national TV. Yada yada yada, then came the coup.
At which point, Trump instructed several thousand of his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol “with strength” and prevent Pence from performing his constitutional duty to count and certify electoral votes—which would officially make Biden the president-elect. So a bunch of very fine people who had recently voted to make Pence vice president walked down Constitution Avenue, erected a gallows, and stormed the Capitol. During the course of these events, many raised their voices to chant, “Hang Mike Pence.”
For his part, Pence is sanguine about this unpleasantness. Last month, when asked about Trump’s latest threat—that it would be “very dangerous” for America if he were convicted of crimes—he waved away the possibility. “Everyone in our movement are the kind of Americans who love this country, are patriotic or law-and-order people who would never have done anything like that there or anywhere else,” Pence told CNN’s Dana Bash.
Bash was brought up short. “That’s pretty remarkable that you’re not concerned about it, given the fact that they wanted to hang you on January 6,” she said.
Pence responded, “The people in this movement, the people who rallied behind our cause in 2016 and 2020, are the most God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic people in this country, and I … won’t stand for those kinds of generalizations, because they have no basis in fact.”
Never in American politics has a candidate so dutifully followed the instruction of Jesus: “To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” So whatever you want to say about Mike Pence, I’ll bet that if a bunch of MAGA Proud Boys demanded his tunic, he’d offer them his cloak too. God bless him.
In other ways, Pence reminds me of an Old Testament figure, one of the prophets who told the Israelites news they didn’t want to hear—but stuck around anyway, reviled by the people he was trying to save.
A few weeks ago, Pence attended a town-hall event in Iowa sponsored by the Family Leader. It was an evangelical-forward gathering attended by the kind of midwestern conservative Christians who have been Pence’s people since he was in short pants. Tucker Carlson, the event’s moderator, tore into Pence both for his refusal to overturn the 2020 election and for his hawkish support of military aid to Ukraine. Pence stood up to Carlson and held to his conservative convictions.
And so, given the choice between a TV presenter who has privately talked about how he hates Trump “passionately” and Trump’s own vice president—a man who has dutifully served conservative causes in government for a generation and who stood by Trump for everything except overthrowing American democracy, the evangelicals … cheered for Tucker and booed Pence.
Give us Barabbas.
The rest of America doesn’t quite know what to do with Pence. He’s a complicated figure.
On the one hand, he tolerated and defended all of the depredations of the Trump years. By vouching for Trump with evangelical voters in 2016, he cemented Trump’s takeover of the party. He stood by Trump after Charlottesville, Virginia. He was Trump’s rock during the first impeachment. He tried to clean up the worst parts of Trump’s mishandling of COVID while being at pains to praise Trump for doing a heroic job. He was a loyal running mate in 2020. He did all of this with his eyes wide open.
On the other hand, at the moment when Trump attempted to thwart the peaceful transition of power, Pence was the only man standing between the Constitution and collapse. After a full term of cowardice, he displayed courage in the moment it mattered most. If he hadn’t followed the law on January 6, there is no telling what would have happened.
Some people maintain that Pence does not deserve credit simply for not breaking the law. I sympathize. I did not rob a bank this morning—do I get a cookie? But ultimately, I find Pence’s heroism in the performance of his duty too great to wave away. He faced physical and professional risk on January 6; his career, his life, and the lives of his family were imperiled. He risked all of that to follow the law. It is nice to think that we all would have done the same, but I’m not sure. And I am sure that the overwhelming majority of Pence’s fellow Republicans would not have.
Further, Pence is one of only three Republicans running for president who consistently speaks straightforwardly about January 6 and the rule of law, and he does not couch his criticisms of Trump as merely being “bad for Republican chances to win.” Pence possesses much of what the prodemocracy movement hopes for in a Republican. In some ways, he is an example of what, in the small-d democratic sense, a Republican Party aiming to restore itself to health and liberalism should look like.
It is precisely because of this that Pence is so reviled by so many Republicans, with a favorability rating that barely breaks even.
It turns out that Pence doesn’t quite know what to do with himself either. So he’s trying his luck at becoming the avatar of the same voters who wanted to hang him.
It’s the damnedest thing. Pence overcame a lifetime of political tribalism to break with his team. And now he’s trying to get back on it—because he can’t see what he helped them become.
One of my pet theories is that during the Trump years, we discovered that our political spectrum had two axes. There’s the left–right, progressive–conservative x-axis that we’re all familiar with. But there’s also an up–down, liberal–illiberal y-axis. This has been the case in America for a long time—since its founding, really—but with the end of Jim Crow, a lot of us had forgotten that this y-axis existed. We assumed that everyone on the conservative, right-hand side of the x-axis—the Reagans, the Bushes, the Doles, the McCains, the Romneys—was also at the top (the liberal end) of the y-axis, too. Because they were.
But with Trump’s emergence, some people—both voters and elected officials—began drifting downward on that y-axis toward the illiberal side of the spectrum.
Pence was happy to play along until the chips were down, at which point he chose liberalism and democracy. And for that, America owes him a debt that can never be repaid.
The tragedy of Pence is that, for all of his x-axis conservative policy views, it’s his conviction in favor of liberalism on the y-axis that now matters most to the conservatives he is asking to vote for him.
A liberal society can have arguments about tax rates and infrastructure spending and foreign policy. In an illiberal society, none of those questions really matters—the only thing that matters is who holds power. “Who, whom?” as the Leninists used to put it.
On the biggest issues—democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law—Mike Pence is now much closer to Joe Biden on the y-axis than he is to Republican voters.
And he either can’t see it, or won’t.