Donald Trump has chosen to spend the waning days of his presidency alternating between feeble efforts to cancel the election and subjecting his vice-president to a series of torments. The New York Times has new details about the latter, which includes Trump making a final demand that Pence attempt an absurd, illegal maneuver to overturn the election results. “You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump said, according to two sources, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
The sheer stupidity on display in this exchange is worth contemplating. Trump was insisting on a theory that had emerged from far-right fever swamps, according to which the vice-president can unilaterally decertify the electoral votes of any state and for any reason he chooses. The theory implies that the Constitution contains a loophole that gives vice-presidents the ability to negate any election result, but that no previous vice-president has bothered to use this tool.
Trump was further supposing that Pence would submit himself to the humiliation of being smacked down by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court. And he believed, most bizarrely of all, that his best way of winning Pence over to this scheme was to call him a “pussy.”
This is Mike Pence. The extremely religious conservative, who won’t be alone in a room with a woman who isn’t his wife and who was mortified by Trump being caught on tape using the word “pussy.” Try telling him Jesus wants him to do it! It probably won’t work, but the pussy line is definitely not going to work.
What is perhaps most revealing about this story is that Pence is finally leaking details of his interactions with Trump. The Trump era has seen a continuous four-year gusher of widely sourced reports attesting to the president’s stupidity, laziness, corruption, and lack of ethics. Almost none of the stories have centered on one-on-one interactions between the two men. Pence has given Trump embarrassing levels of obsequious loyalty.
His loyalists now finally see a need to distance him from Trump. Joe Grogan, a former Trump adviser, tells the Times, “In many ways, I think it vindicates the decision of Mike Pence to hang in there this long.” Oh, really? What it took for Pence to turn against Trump was not only Trump losing — and then attempting to steal — the election, but whipping up a mob that attempted to murder Mike Pence. And even all that was not enough for Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, or even publicly denounce Trump. He’s just leaking unflattering stories.
Politico reports that now, post-Trump siccing a murderous mob on him, Pence is “done with Trump’s bullshit,” in the words of a Pence adviser, who explains that by “done,” he means continuing to quietly serve Trump without either public protest or using his powers to thwart his boss: “He’s not going to give a primetime speech saying, ‘F you Donald Trump,’ but in his own way he is going to just get to the finish line and keep his head down.” Pence’s idea of rebellion is most people’s idea of obedience.
Pence did not deserve to have his life threatened. But every other humiliation he has endured through his service to this cretinous gangster will never be punishment enough.
