Mike Pence RetCons Mike Pence

Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Former vice president, former Governor of Indiana, and former member of congress Mike Pence officially launched his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Since he’s been running for president in all but name since February, 2021, this was not a surprise to anyone who has been paying a lick of attention.

The Washington Post quotes Pence’s supporting Super PAC co-chair Scott Reed on the occasion. As to how Mike Pence presidential candidate is going to handle former boss and also presidential candidate Donald Trump, Reed says “He’s not going to try to out-Trump Trump; he’s going to stand out as a leader of character.”

A what now? A leader of what? Did, did he really just drop the “C” word on Mike Pence?

Reed isn’t alone. There is, apparently, a subset of right-leaning politicos who make this argument that Mike Pence spent 4 years in the floodwaters of Trump but managed to come out clean on the other side. It shouldn’t surprise, since there is still this cottage industry among conservative and establishment GOP circles that somehow Trump was this anomaly that didn’t really happen and can be fended off by saying “Reagan” three times in a mirror. Which fits Mike Pence, who is constitutionally incapable of giving any speech without at least one Reagan reference in it.

Such folks apparently write Mike Pence a political blank check with “benefit of the doubt” in the memo block. I have low expectations of National Review pieces attributed to “The Editors” these days but sweet Molly Magee on a motorboat this is something else:

Pence is uniquely well situated to confront Trump over his failings, should he choose to do so. Nobody served him more loyally; nobody can match Pence’s moral standing to point out where Trump left the path of right and reason. We hope that he says those things, and lets the chips fall where they may…As we have expressed with the other entrants challenging Trump’s hold on the party, all we ask is that Pence not linger too long in the race if he is unable to do so. But we have faith that a man of his integrity will not only be uncowed in entering the race, but also unselfish if the time comes to leave it.

His, WHAT? Did, did they really just drop the “I” word on Mike Pence?

Why are otherwise salient and intelligent folks playing along with this exercise in retconning Mike Pence? A retcon, for the uninitiated, is shorthand for retroactive continuity, the literary and movie/tv device where upon some previously established fact or narrative is changed to fit the need of the moment. Bring back that dead character, change someone from good to bad, add the unknown child, so and so awakes from a coma, all great retcons to advance the story.

To recap, on his first official day of campaigning, Mike Pence is already retconning the living hell out of the political history of Mike Pence.

Let’s just start with Mike Pence’s own, official campaign bio page, as pointed out by Alex Thompson:

Mike Pence’s website has a lengthy bio but yada-yada’s over 2017-2021https://t.co/O4I7aqDNjz pic.twitter.com/tZGpJ3Jgnb

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 7, 2023

Hold on. Computer, enhance:

So, according to Captain Integrity Mike Pence’s own campaign website, nothing of consequence or note that would pad his stats for his own presidential aspirations occurred between January 20th, 2016, and February of 2021.

One more time for the folks from Logan:

According to MikePence2024.com nothing of consequence or note that would pad his stats for his own presidential aspirations occurred between January 20th, 2016, and February of 2021.

While the old hymn lyric insists that describing the love of God needs oceans filled with ink, skies made of parchment, every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade to sufficiently explain, you could still fit that whole shebang of deified reactive attachment inside the vast and loving galaxy of Mike Pence’s integrity. Or something, at least according to the editors of the self-described “America’s most influential magazine for conservative news, commentary, and opinion.”

God love him, as our current President whose win put Mike Pence out of office is prone to say. Bless their hearts.

Pence invokes the Almighty frequently, in everything from his campaign announcement to the title of his pre-campaign biography. His signature catchphrase for as long as he’s been a politician is that “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican — in that order.” Handily enough, that sequencing checks all the boxes for a GOP political career. His pre-decision “prayerfully considering” about whether to run for office or not always seems to end in an answer that the Lord wants him to climb that next rung on the electoral ladder. Or as Politico got it from a longtime associate of Mike Pence:

“He doesn’t have the same measuring stick,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and former neighbor of Pence. “He’s talking to his wife, and he’s reading the Bible, and he’s praying about it and trying to figure out if this is what God wants him to do. He’s probably paying more attention to that than he is any polling. That doesn’t mean he does not consider it. It’s just not his priority.”

Whoever said the Lord worked in mysterious ways clearly doesn’t have Jesus on the main line like Mike Pence does. Garth might sing about unanswered prayers, but when it comes to Pence and achieving higher office, apparently the answer from God’s lips to Mike’s ears is always Deo volente, Mikey.

Whether the good Lord wills it or not, polling and common sense say the GOP primary voters probably won’t. The small cadre of folks willing to say nice things about the former vice president usually point to his actions on January 6th, 2021, and praise him with some variation of “he did the right thing there!” What nonsense. Mike Pence rode the Trump Train up until the last possible moment and did the only thing permissible by law for him to do. The bar-on-the-floor level of praising someone for not breaking the law, which even if he did would have accomplished nothing other than the LARPing shuffling of pretty papers in ornamental envelopes, as our friend Burt Likko has explained in detail.

But consider, Praetorians of Pence the Principled, Mike himself proclaiming as he did at his launch that “the American people deserve to know that on [Jan. 6], President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution” reminds everyone why he was there in the first place. He hitched his limited political prospects to the Star of Trump and went for the ride. That it took the events of January 6th for him to offer the bare minimum protest of not breaking the law he was sworn to uphold is not praiseworthy, it is damning.

Even in his announcement to challenge Trump for the nomination he still soft peddles what Trump was wanting him to do. It is not like Pence resigned in protest as other members of the Trump administration did in the aftermath of January 6th. He “kept his oath” but also wanted to make sure he had a chance to keep those Trump voters if at all possible. He did the right thing in a bad situation, but it was a bad situation he himself helped create and let fester to the last possible moment because Mike Pence deemed it politically expedient to do so.

Just to drive the point home that Mike Pence wants praise for doing what a sworn office holder one heartbeat from the presidency is just supposed to do, his campaign emphasized this great moment in Pence folklore to the assembled media at his launch:

2024 Watch: Check out the wifi password at the ⁦@Mike_Pence⁩ 2024 #GOP presidential campaign launch today in Ankeny, Iowa. #2024Election #iacaucus pic.twitter.com/5GGsDukq21

— Paul Steinhauser (@steinhauserNH1) June 7, 2023

See, it’s the quiet ones you have to really watch out for. Ethics classes should take a break from the beat-to-death trolley problem and hash out the implications of the contrasting Trump and Pence methods. Is Trump’s cursing, threatening, grabbing by, and overall brashness better or worse than Pence standing beside him as he does so with a “bless your heart” and Gene Kelly tap dance routine around what just happened, and Trump had to do it, and oh look at that woke squirrel over yonder threatening our great nation’s nut.

Trump, for all his amoral flaws and miscellaneous villainy, is not subtle about it. Trump told the world for decades across the back pages of the New York press, gossip columns, splashy affairs, media omnipresence, reality tv, and social media exactly who and what he is, was, and will be. If a voter didn’t do the required reading on who and what Donald J. Trump’s decades in the public spotlight was telling them, that is on them. Trump told you with his entire life who he was; a bunch of folks just didn’t believe him, for their own various and assorted reasons. Trump puts anyone and everyone under the bus that doesn’t toe the line of Trump the Magnificent, and wants people to know it.

Mike Pence wants his political persona and narrative to be as carefully managed as the hard parted lines of his haircut. Mike Pence wants to be the modern-day Daniel, the one righteous man in Babylon who navigated to the heights of power. Mike Pence is counting on GOP primary voters that will somehow forget he was beside Trump for all the bad while simultaneously remembering him being beside Trump for all the good. The former VP somehow thinks a combination of events, divine intervention, and the sheer indefatigable self-righteousness of Mike Pence will somehow carry the day, win the election, and finally make him president.

It is a fool’s errand, but Mike Pence is just that kind of fool. The impregnably self-righteous kind of fool who has finally gotten far enough down his own rabbit hole he no longer correctly computes how the world is spinning around him anymore. Forget trying to out Trump-Trump, Mike Pence is stuck in a doom loop of trying to out Mike Pence-Mike Pence. An effort which is going to cause a singularity of anti-charisma grimacing and “ah, shucks” answers with buzzwords about God, country, and Reagan, ripped apart by the gravitational pull of Trump and eventually folding in on itself into the black nothingness of also-ran status.

But Mike Pence shouldn’t call it a loss. He should see it as a lesson in character and integrity, specifically how his special brand and application of both led him to this point.

Deo volente, Mike Pence. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

Sorrows. Sorrows. Prayers.