Americans are dying. Trump is threatening democracy.
Where is Mike Pence?
Opinion by
Deputy editorial page editor
November 19, 2020 at 5:43 p.m. CST
Where
is Vice President Pence?
To be
more precise, will the vice president — the one administration official who is
absolutely safe from being fired by President Trump — ever acknowledge the
reality that he and Trump lost?
Does he
think it’s appropriate for Trump to summon leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state
legislature to the White House in an attempt to subvert the election
results?
Does he
believe, as Trump attorney Sidney Powell asserted groundlessly
Thursday, that “President Trump won by a landslide, we are going to prove it”?
Or, as Rudolph W. Giuliani claimed, “This
has been a massive attack on the integrity of the voting system in
the greatest democracy on earth. The people who did this have committed one of
the worst crimes that I’ve ever seen or observed.”
And
even if Pence doesn’t manage a baseline nod in the direction of rationality and
small-d, democratic values, will the vice president at least make clear that he
will play no role in whatever mischief Trump and his cronies are cooking up to
try to deny the presidency to Biden?
No one
who has watched Pence’s bobble-headed sycophancy over the past four years
should expect much in the way of bravery. That is not the Pence way. The closest
he comes to distancing himself from Trump’s excesses is silence. That loyalty
is understandable — and under ordinary circumstances, perhaps even commendable
— from a vice president, particularly one with presidential ambitions of his
own to tend.
These
are not ordinary circumstances.
For one
thing, there is the pandemic, which grows ever more lethal. Pence, who heads
the administration’s coronavirus task force, took to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in
June to decry “grim predictions of a second wave,” urging people not to “panic”
over “overblown” media scare tactics. The Trump-Pence campaign turned itself
into a roving superspreader event; at least four Pence aides, including his
chief of staff, tested positive for covid-19.
Yet
Pence remained typically mute as Trump mocked mask-wearing as politically
correct weakness. Now a quarter of a million Americans have died. In the face of pleas from public health experts, the
Trump administration has refused to cooperate with the Biden transition team,
hobbling efforts to plan for vaccine distribution and assess testing
capabilities. This is not just hard-knuckle partisan politics — it is dangerous
malfeasance in an area of Pence’s core responsibility.
The
vice president’s silence, and his capitulation to Trump’s intransigence,
carries deadly consequences. “More people may die if we don’t coordinate,”
Biden warned this week. Such deaths are on Pence’s conscience.
Then
there is the threat to democracy itself posed by Trump’s increasingly
delusional claims that the election was somehow tainted by massive fraud that
wrested victory from him. Pence has not echoed these baseless assertions. His
comments have been comparatively anodyne and notably sporadic. “As the votes
continue to be counted, we’re going to remain vigilant, as the president said,”
Pence said in brief remarks in the early morning hours after Election Day.
“We’re going to protect the integrity of the vote.”
In the
weeks since, Pence has lent his name to the rotating cast of Trumpian
characters who besiege supporters with requests for contributions. “No matter
what the media says, this Election is not over,” Pence emailed supporters
Thursday morning. “More votes are coming in for the President every single day,
and with your help, we’ll secure FOUR MORE YEARS for the American People.”
That’s
looking increasingly doubtful to anyone who has a grip on reality. To Trump and
his coalition of the crazed, it means grasping at ever more extreme measures to
cling to power. Having realized that Trump has no hope of reversing Biden’s
wins in key states, these operatives are now trying desperately to delay the
final vote certification and perhaps create chaos when Congress convenes in a
special joint session on Jan. 6 to count the results and declare the winner.
Ominously, The Post’s Amy Gardner, Robert Costa, Rosalind S. Helderman and
Michelle Ye Hee Lee report, Trump urged advisers to “go to the limit” in contesting the
election and delegitimizing Biden’s win.
Pence
being Pence, which is to say both feckless and ambitious, it’s probably naive
to expect that he will take any steps to deter Trump’s salt-the-earth strategy.
He is, granted, in a difficult spot — petrified, like other Republican elected
officials, of doing anything to incite the president and thereby anger his
base; wary, like other potential 2024 contenders, of a Trump re-run in four
years. But it might not be too much to expect Pence to distance himself from
Trump’s “go to the limit” approach, as exemplified by the Trump lawyers’
bonkers statements and the president’s effort to overturn the Michigan result.
Pence
heads to Georgia on Friday to campaign for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler
ahead of the two Senate runoffs early next year. The strongest argument for
getting Republicans to the polls on Jan. 5 is that failing to reelect Perdue
and Loeffler would result in a 50-50 Senate — with Vice President Kamala D.
Harris poised to break a tie.
Perhaps
it’s an opportune moment for Pence to recognize that reality and, finally, do
what’s best for his party instead of what’s best for Trump.
