Mike Pence Won’t Endorse Trump. Does It Matter?

Mike Pence during his moment of truth on January 6. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mike Pence, the man who spent four years sucking up to Donald Trump, admiring his “broad shoulders,” and convincing his fellow conservative Christians to share his adoration of the heathenish MAGA movement founder, is now refusing to endorse the 45th president’s reelection bid.

Is that significant? It depends on how you look at it. The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last thinks it’s a really big deal:

[W]hen democracy was on the line, the main body of his party demanded he commit a high crime, and an armed mob came to murder him, Pence jumped on the grenade. …

Pence tried to save his party one final time by running for president and testifying about Trump’s actions on January 6th.

And finally, with Trump having secured the delegates necessary to hold the Republican nomination, Pence went on Fox News on Friday to announce that he would not endorse Trump.

It’s not 100 percent clear Pence’s non-endorsement will stick. After all, on August 23, 2023, in the first debate of 2024 presidential candidates, Pence was among the six on the stage who raised their hands when asked if they would endorse Trump as a presidential candidate even if he’s a convicted criminal. He seems more determined to oppose Joe Biden than to avoid supporting Trump, as Politico reports:

Pence declined to say how he would vote in November, save to rule out the current president.

“I’m gonna keep my vote to myself,” he said. “I would never vote for Joe Biden.”

To be sure, Pence is the highest-ranking among a significant number of former Trump administration officials who won’t at this point endorse their former boss. And he’s the rare veep who has sought to displace his presidential benefactor (though not the only one: Sitting vice-president John Nance Garner challenged FDR’s re-nomination in 1940).

Without question, Pence has already done his patriotic duty in resisting Trump’s authoritarian behavior. The more we learn about what happened before and during January 6, 2021, the more it’s clear Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential results strictly depended on Pence disrupting the electoral vote count and giving Republican-controlled state legislatures the time and encouragement to revoke and replace the electors Joe Biden won. Trump’s veep maintained a constitutional process that kept him and the Boss from interfering with the requisite surrender of power.

But the Republican Party has now emphatically rejected Pence’s interpretation of events and embraced Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that 2020 was a stolen election, with 2024 serving as an opportunity to steal back control of Washington. Indeed, the 45th president has made his twisted version of the January 6 insurrection a centerpiece of his campaign, as the Associated Press explains:

Initially relegated to a fringe theory on the edges of the Republican Party, the revisionist history of Jan. 6, which Trump amplified during the early days of the GOP primary campaign to rouse his most devoted voters, remains a rally centerpiece even as he must appeal more broadly to a general election audience….

At the same time, Trump’s allies are installing 2020 election-deniers to the Republican National Committee, further institutionalizing the lies that spurred the violence. That raises red flags about next year, when Congress will again be called upon to certify the vote.

And they’re not alone. Republicans in Congress are embarking on a re-investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack that seeks to shield Trump of wrongdoing while lawmakers are showcasing side theories about why thousands of his supporters descended on Capitol Hill in what became a brutal scene of hand-to-hand combat with police.

History is being re-written every day, with Mike Pence drawn as a villain rather than a hero. If Pence wants to maintain the truth and his own dignity, he will not simply stand on the sidelines (assuming that’s his plan), but will carry his defiance of MAGA pathologies into the general election. That means supporting Trump’s only real opponent, Joe Biden. It’s unlikely many Republicans will follow, but Pence must once again make his own case for what happened on January 6, and what it might mean for the future.