Scaros: Mike Pence Shows How to Disagree with Trump While Still Supporting Him
Are you tired of the establishment media, the Democratic Party as a whole, many in the Republican Party, and even non-partisan Never Trumpers completely trashing the 45th president of the United States?
Do you wish there was a book that effectively laid out all of President Donald Trump’s accomplishments and called out Democrats for their hypocrisy — but written by someone credible, not just a lackey still clinging to Trump’s coattails for self-serving purposes?
Well, look no further than “So Help Me God” by former Vice President Mike Pence.
Yeah, that’s right. The same Mike Pence whom an unruly mob wanted to “hang” on Jan. 6, 2021, because he refused to turn America into a dictatorship where he’d be the single most powerful person in the nation, with the ability to decide whether or not presidential electors certified by their respective state legislatures were legitimate.
Following that logic, it really wouldn’t matter whether or not we vote in 2024, because the outcome would not depend on the electors, on Congress, or even on the will of the people. Nope. It would all come down to whatever struck Kamala Harris’ fancy. After all, she’s the vice president, isn’t she?
But fringe mobs don’t think that far ahead. As long as they can bend the rules, twist them into pretzels, or obliterate them for their own short-term advantage, they don’t think atrocious decisions will someday return to haunt them.
When Nancy Pelosi completely discredited herself by orchestrating an unfounded kangaroo court impeachment against Trump not once but twice, she opened the door for Republicans to do the same the next time they were in charge of the House. As did Mitch McConnell when he held up President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Think the Democrats won’t try the same trick someday?
Will the Republicans take the high road and impeach a Democratic president only if the evidence against him or her is so strong that it garners wide bipartisan support? Will Democrats vote fairly on a Republican president’s judicial nominee? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
In “So Help Me God,” Pence teaches us the meaning of the words honesty, integrity and loyalty. Unlike so many feckless hacks who got their 15 minutes of fame working for Trump and then turned on him like vultures the moment he cut them loose, Pence is able to separate the four years of great accomplishments that he and Trump oversaw from the two men’s starkly different approaches following the 2020 election.
But even if Pence had turned on Trump, I couldn’t entirely blame him. I mean, if I were eminently loyal to a president whose tone and demeanor were diametrically opposed to my own — and yet served as his gentlemanly sidekick, defending him to ambivalent supporters who endorsed his policies but found him to be odiously gauche — and then he seemed more consumed with the election outcome than with the safety of my family and me, who were trapped inside the Capitol, I’d be pretty upset, too.
Yet the vast majority of the book’s pages are filled with praise and admiration for Trump’s transformational presidency, as well as reminders of Democratic hypocrisy — such as the fact that separating illegal border-crossers from their children began under the Obama administration, and it was Trump who ended the practice.
As for the 2020 election, Pence supported the legal challenges and continues to do so, and readily identifies numerous irregularities and outright violations of law. Where Pence breaks with Trump is that he doesn’t acknowledge “widespread fraud” that conclusively changed the election’s outcome.
In a recent interview on PBS, Pence reiterated the points he made in his book and again credited Trump with enhancing Ronald Reagan’s great presidency by making border security part of national security and focusing on the multiple threats posed by China.
In my own book “Trumped-Up Charges!,” I thoroughly debunked 10 widely circulated falsehoods about Trump, even though I never claimed that Trump was flawless. Pence does much the same. It’s OK to support someone only 95 percent of the time.
Granted, much of this smells like Pence contemplating a presidential run in 2024. Personally, I think he’s too plain vanilla and not the visionary Trump is. But the 2020 election was more than “commiecrats cheating.” It went beyond the accurate but poorly delivered cries of the “lamestream media” colluding with the “deep state.”
A big part of the outcome was that even though tens of millions of Americans loved Trump’s bombast, or brushed it aside because his presidency yielded very good results, even more Americans couldn’t take the daily frenzy, to the point where they preferred Joe Biden, who even in his prime was mediocre and whose cognitive skills have rapidly deteriorated. In Mike Pence, voters gain almost all of Trump’s policies in the form of a calm, polite man whose gosh darn syrupy persona can win over a lot of Democrats.
Would a President Pence be dull? Sure, but dull is what the voters chose in 2020 — and got runaway inflation, a border crisis and wokeness run amok as part of the deal. At least with Pence we’ll be better off in terms of those three catastrophes.
This is not a campaign pitch for Pence. I think that even if he runs, winning the nomination would be a long shot. This is more of a “thank you,” because if Pence, who’d been through so much as Trump’s most loyal soldier and yet in the end was thrown under the bus, can find a way to defend Trump’s record so strongly, then anyone with an open mind might consider the thought that objectively, on the whole, Trump’s record is worth defending.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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