The Curious Case of Mike Pence

Too good for MAGA, not good enough for conservatives.

Over the weekend, former Vice President Mike Pence ended his campaign for president, declaring it had “become clear to me it’s not my time.” Which isn’t quite right—for all his strengths (yes, he has some), Pence has never fully matched his thinking to the needs of the time.

As a member of Congress, Pence had a respectable conservative voting record, although when it came to distinguishing himself, he lent his name to an immigration “compromise” plan that in reality was just another amnesty. As governor of Indiana, he caved to the Left on healthcare, Common Core education, and even religious liberty. Then, long after it was clear conservatives’ only viable conservative alternative to Donald Trump in 2016 was Ted Cruz, Pence endorsed Cruz in the most tepid way possible, at the same time hedging his bets with qualifiers that he was “not against anybody” and “particularly want[ed] to commend” Trump for having “given voice to the frustration of millions of working Americans with a lack of progress in Washington, D.C.”

So when Trump picked Pence as his running mate, it was both unsurprising and an apparent indicator not to expect too much from his administration. But given the...unique...challenges presented by having a person like Donald in the most demanding office in the world, Pence turned out to the perfect pick...for a while, at least.

During the first three years, Pence had the unenviable job of making a White House headed by a self-obsessed, emotionally-maladjusted imbecile seem like an operation of competent, responsible adults. And whenever he was in front of the camera, he nailed it. With his Christian faith, years of experience in both the Beltway and state executive office, softspoken-yet-firm demeanor and looking like the ideal generic POTUS you’d see in an espionage thriller or disaster movie, Pence somehow managed to give a freaking Trump administration an air of dignity and professionalism.

But while Pence’s inherent moderation likely helped somewhat to balance out Trump’s optics, it was only a matter of time until his policy instincts blew up—as they did in the worst possible way, when he was put in charge of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. As summarized by the Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker, Pence contributed to just about everything the government did wrong in the pandemic, and regrets none of it:

We can stop there and finish by observing that nothing in this book contradicts what we’ve learned over these two years, namely that Mike Pence served as both a carrier pigeon and protecting veil for the national security state that took over the country in March 2020. It was he who gave the okay to Birx’s subversions. It was he who assisted in convincing Trump of the lockdowns. It was he who pushed the panic that led to massive spending, overpurchases of masks and ventilators, he who pushed for the deployment of the Defense Production Act, and he who sent the Navy hospital ship to New York that went unused. And he not only defends all his actions but implies that they were all blessed by God.

In a just political climate capable of focusing on what matters most, this would have earned Trump and Pence exile from the American Right, side-by-side. But Mike’s boss had one last twist in store for him.

After almost two months of trying and utterly failing to reverse the 2020 election with quite possibly the most incompetent lawyering ever seen in national politics, Trump summoned his supporters to Washington, D.C. to protest Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results, in a march that readers might remember didn’t turn out so well. In the process, he made Pence the scapegoat for the dashing of all those unrealistic hopes, because Pence, in his procedural role in certification as President of the Senate, did not block the counting of the electoral votes—something that most likely would have been unconstitutional, and as a practical matter wouldn’t have worked anyway, because it’s extraordinarily unlikely either the House of Representatives or the legislatures of the disputed states would have dared the immense political fallout of going against their official election results.

Up until this point, Pence had been the most loyal vice president anyone could have hoped for; for Trump to turn around and make him an object of intense hatred in his fans’ eyes—to give a single, last-minute act Pence couldn’t have even done the burden of making up for four years of Trump’s own negligence and incompetence on the issue paving the way for his own defeat—is one of the most grotesque back-stabbings ever seen in American politics. In non-MAGA eyes, however, it drew attention away from Pence’s own very real sins and generated considerable sympathy for him, including among those of us who were never his biggest fans.

In light of such an absurd and bitter end to the Trump-Pence alliance, it’s unsurprising that Pence would see the 2024 primary as an opportunity for a little payback. Alas, being ultimately a man of the Swamp, he could not see that the best revenge would not be getting on a stage and having his competitors agree that he “did his duty” on January 6, but seeing to it that a superior conservative leader won the nomination instead of Trump.

Unfortunately, Pence didn’t use his campaign strictly as an opportunity to fight Trump, but as a vehicle for his broader gripes with how the Right has moved beyond him, in ways both good and bad. To his credit, he clapped back at the Right’s quasi-isolationist element, as seen in a debate with Tucker Carlson that populist grifters blatantly lied about. But he also peddled disgraceful idiocy about Ron DeSantis’s revocation of special privileges for Disney being “politically motivated government intervention in the private sector”; and even lent credence to the leftist lie that Florida educational standards claimed good came from slavery. (So it’s probably for the best that Pence not do the right thing and endorse DeSantis.)

Put all of the above together, and it’s no wonder Pence’s campaign ultimately amounted to nothing. Had Trump’s presidency ended differently, Pence could have been an asset to bridging MAGA and traditional conservatism. And if he was more able to separate himself from the GOP conventional wisdom of the past, he could have been a powerful ally against Trump’s takeover of the Right.

But due to factors both within and beyond his control, he ultimately settled into an in-between niche incapable of fully satisfying anyone—too principled and too conservative for MAGA, but not principled or conservative enough for conservatives who fully recognize the gravity of America’s situation.

Mike Pence is correct that 2024 was not his time. But that’s because Pence’s time has come and gone—and while it was certainly better than our present situation in several ways, it also gave us the original disease to which Trump was, wrongly, sold as the cure.