Mike Pence’s takedown of Trump shows how lost traditional Republicans are
Pence, once seen as a future president, now represents a lost and bewildered Republican ideal
Exactly eight years ago, as the first Trump administration entered its second 100 days in office, vice president Mike Pence’s name was on the lips of worried Republicans.
Early scandals were plunging Donald Trump’s stewardship of the White House into chaos. “Conservatives”, reported Politico on 5 May, 2017, were talking “seriously, if a bit wistfully, about two words: President Pence”.
History, of course, had dramatically different plans. So on Sunday, in recognition of his role resisting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Pence was given this year’s John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Accepting the honour, Pence unloaded on Trump’s record. Rebuking his former boss, he praised America’s governing institutions for surviving Trump’s efforts to undermine them.
“In these divided times, in these anxious days, I know in my heart that we will find our way forward as one nation,” Pence said. He vowed to be a “consistent voice for those conservative values that I think are…the best way forward for a boundless future for the American people”.
In a subsequent interview on CNN, the former vice president slammed Trump’s trade war as “indiscriminate” and “not a win for the American people”. He assailed Trump’s belief that Russian president Vladimir Putin truly seeks peace in Ukraine, saying “Putin doesn’t want peace. He wants Ukraine”.
What Pence wants is also clear: by promising to speak out whenever Trump veers away from a traditional conservative agenda, he hopes to find a way back among a Republican Party that has largely deserted him.
But he faces a Trump-sized problem. The President has variously dismissed Pence as “delusional”, “not a very good person” and a politician who went “to the Dark Side”. Like other anti-Trump Republicans now considered traitors by a White House crew made up entirely of the President’s Maga loyalists, Pence surely knows the limits of his prospects with Trump at the centre of his party’s universe.
Other prominent figures accused by Trump of betrayal are also wandering the political wilderness.
Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who joined Democrats in trying to hold Trump to account for the 6th January uprising, now teaches at the University of Virginia. Former congressman Adam Kinzinger from Illinois, who joined her aboard the House of Representatives Select Committee that investigated the riot, is a commentator on CNN.
Some elected Republicans in Washington who oppose many of Trump’s policies are also expressing grave concerns of retribution.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refused to back the President’s choices to lead the Pentagon and the FBI, publicly criticised Trump’s embrace of Putin and slammed Elon Musk’s firing of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers. Last month she told a conference in Anchorage that she is “oftentimes very anxious about using my voice because retaliation is real”. In a stunning admission, she went on to assert that “we are all afraid”.
Retaliation at Trump’s hands comes in many forms. He is never hesitant to vilify his opponents. Along with Musk, he has threatened to back primary challengers to those lawmakers brave enough to cross him. His control of the Republican National Committee – the party’s central organising body – gives him considerable leeway to determine the fate even of stalwarts on Capitol Hill.
So Pence knows that he must now bide his time, and hope that the vicissitudes of political life create winds that may be unthinkable now, but ultimately propel him back to prominence. It will be a long, hard road for his commitment to the ideals of free trade, democracy and the vital importance of the country’s constitutional guard-rails, ideals for which Republicans used to stand.
All three may be out of vogue in Washington today, but the future of the country and the former vice president may hinge on that changing.
