The Pence case against Trump

?Another of my Common Sense columns from Lake Champlain Weekly. This one was published on August 16th

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It is more than seventy years since a former or serving Vice-President of the United States sought his party’s nomination for President and lost. (It was Alben Barkley, in 1952, since you didn’t ask). That would seem to bode well for former VPOTUS, Mike Pence, who seems to have qualified to participate in the Republican primary debates. Of course, it is even longer since people who served together as POTUS and VPOTUS have competed with each other for office (FDR and John Nance Garner in 1940) or since a former President has run for reelection (Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. He lost the primaries to the incumbent, President Taft, and the general election to Woodrow Wilson). There are not enough precedents to make sensible comparisons. We just have to look at Pence on his own merits.

Pence was a staunch opponent of President Trump who became his loyal deputy and then baulked at Trump’s final White House tantrum. He was of great value to Trump in 2016, but now seems irrelevant. He was Trump’s link to, Reaganite, economic conservatives. He was the man who could reassure the Party that Trump was not abandoning every aspect of free market economics. He was also the link to another core Republican base: evangelicals. They had been dubious of Trump, since he plainly has no interest in their religious agenda, indeed no interest in religion at all. He’s not a churchgoer, and it is doubtful that he believes in any deity greater than himself.

But it seems those things don’t matter any more. On the question of the economy, Trump has changed much of the Republican Party. It now believes in expanding the role of the federal government and using it to control business. Evangelicals are still a core voting block for Republicans, but they don’t seem to care that Trump is irreligious.

Pence has been a critical witness in the various cases against Trump. The federal indictments for seeking to overturn the 2020 election make much of evidence that Trump seemed to accept in private that he had lost, while publicly claiming that he had not. He pressed Pence to discard legitimate Electoral College votes from several states, and when Pence responded that he had no power to do that, Trump complained that his Vice President was “too honest”.

Pence is off to a good start by selling merchandise emblazoned with “too honest”. He might be wise to start using phrases from the Bible to renew his connection to the base. He should declare that he refused to “bear false witness” on Trump’s behalf. He has argued that no one who put himself ahead of the Constitution is fit to be President. But Chris Christie is better equipped to make the secular case against Trump.

Pence should be willing to argue that he worked for four years with Trump. He knows Trump. He knows that Trump does not go to church and does not pray. If he declares that he does not think that Trump believes in God, that is one thing that might genuinely shake Trump’s hold on evangelicals.

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Quentin Langley lives in New York and teaches at NYU and Manhattan College. His book, Business and the Culture of Ethics was published in September 2020

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