Poor Mike Pence. You remember Mike Pence—he’s the guy who defeated a roomful of lickspittles to claim the obsequiousness grand prize at a 2017 cabinet meeting, praising the dear leader once every 12.5 seconds. Well, it seems that Mike Pence thinks he has a shot at the presidency. He’s building a campaign team, has made numerous trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and is appearing at campaign events for candidates challenging Trump-supported nutters.

You can imagine how the conversation went with his political advisers: People are tired of Trump. They’re exhausted by all the drama. They want to move on. And you’re the perfect person to fill the void. You served him faithfully, but when it came to violating the Constitution, you stood your ground. Voters will recognize your courage. And you are the true conservative!

Marc Short, Pence’s vice-presidential chief of staff, offered that, “If he were to run, he may not be the biggest celebrity. But if we’re going to go back to a principled conservative who represents the things we stand for, then there’s no one better than Mike.”

“If we’re going to go back.” Not likely. But Pence seems to think there’s a yearning for that. He’s blown the dust off yellowing copies of his Before Time speeches and sprinkled his text with the sort of Christian-y talk that got him a House seat and the Indiana governor’s chair: “Pray for our opponents,” he told a (small) audience at a South Carolina church, “that their hearts would soften and their minds would open to the unimaginable beauty that is life.”

Isn’t that nice? But there are a few flies in the ointment.

First problem. Now? Now is the moment that Pence rolls out the prayer? As Pence is well-situated to know, big chunks of the GOP base have become hungry for a very different tone. Christian charity is out. Vulgar insults, shameless lies, and secessionist hatred are in. It sure is ugly, but Pence is in no position to complain. It’s a revolution that Mike Pence did so much to encourage, and it’s bizarre that he seems to think he can carry on as if nothing has changed.

Pence prostituted his reputation for Christian piety to the most vile figure in the history of American presidential politics, a man who modeled the opposite of every virtue taught in Sunday school. Pence lent his credibility as a religious man to a villain, and gave permission to millions of self-styled Christians to vote for him. Pence’s pious conscience was remarkably quiescent when Trump encouraged his followers to rough up hecklers; when he bore false witness against Muslim Americans (falsely claiming that he saw them celebrating after 9/11); when he attempted to extort the president of Ukraine to lie about Joe Biden; when he separated asylum-seeking parents from their children; when he refused to condemn the tiki-torch Nazi wannabes in Charlottesville; when he elevated a series of kooks and conspiracists to high office; and when he insisted that the election had been stolen.

Pence was fine with all of it.

Second problem: Worse than simply remaining silent, he played the toady with seemingly endless reserves of self-mortification, uttering cringeworthy encomia to Trump’s “broad-shouldered leadership” (a phrase he repeated at least 17 times), and audacious lies about matters big and small.

There was no bottom to Pence’s fawning. To please Trump, he called Joe Arpaio, a convicted criminal (pardoned by Trump) and thuggish abuser of power, a “tireless champion of the rule of law” and said he was “honored” by Arpaio’s presence at his speech. He claimed, preposterously, that Trump had performed magnificently in the face of the COVID pandemic: “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

When Pence traveled to Ireland on an official visit, he didn’t stay in Dublin, but traipsed 140 miles west to stay at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, necessitating a 40 minute flight and hour-long drive each way. Must have been inconvenient, but then, if Trump had asked Pence to crawl both ways, he would doubtless have obliged.

Pence helped transform the GOP from a conservative party into a cult, and as he is discovering to his sorrow, cults don’t behave the way normal political parties do. That’s why Pence’s gamble that he will get credit from the base for his loyal service to the leader is foolhardy. He is at the mercy of the leader. If the leader disowns him, no history of loyalty to Trump himself, far less service to conservative goals, will save him. Ask Jeff Sessions. Ask Mo Brooks. Pence is attempting to finesse this by referring frequently to the Trump/Pence administration and declining to criticize Trump—even for January 6. When speaking of it (which he tries to avoid), he calls it a “dark day,” adding that he supposes he and Trump will “never see eye to eye” about it. Got that? Trump sicced an armed and violent mob on Pence by tweeting that Pence had failed him, and Pence responds that, gosh darn it, sometimes friends disagree.

Third problem: It’s impossible to say how large a contingent of Republican primary voters are in the “Pence is a Traitor” camp, but consider that a recent New York Times/Sienna poll found that only 6 percent of Republicans would vote for Pence in a 2024 primary. At their dueling campaign appearances in Arizona, Trump assembled a rally attended by thousands while Pence spoke to a crowd estimated at 300.

There may indeed be an audience in the GOP for someone other than Trump. A softening in his support is now just barely discernible in polling and lack of donor enthusiasm. But the Trump base will not forgive Pence. Better to turn to someone like DeSantis who hasn’t been guilty of abiding by the Constitution.

And if the GOP were, by some miracle, to seek an honest, non-authoritarian, traditionally conservative candidate, there are other choices including Liz Cheney, Larry Hogan, and Adam Kinzinger, who have reminded Republicans of what conservatism can look like.

Pence did a great thing for the country on January 6. His tragedy is that he has managed to earn the contempt of the MAGA world and the anti-MAGA world. Again, he deserves full credit for not obeying Trump’s command to refuse to count the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. That took courage and a certain amount of integrity and saved the country from a constitutional crisis and possibly worse. Considering the stakes, he should have followed it up with total honesty about how we reached that frightening moment in American democracy. If he had attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment, or encouraged senators to convict Trump at the second impeachment, or testified in public to the House January 6th Committee, it might have gone some way to compensate for the infamy of the past four years.

Pence chose another path—trying to have it both ways. It will end, perhaps appropriately, with a whimper.

We are all, by now, familiar with the most appalling, “boy did that age poorly” anonymous quote in the history of American politics, published by the Washington Post less than two months before the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol and the attempted assassination of the vice president:

“What’s the downside for humoring him?” they mused.

This pearl of anti-wisdom has become a bumper sticker for Republican cowardice ever since it was published. It has been lambasted by political rivals, Twitter smartasses, and websites populated by Enemies of the People.

The quote was rattling around my brain last Thursday night as I watched Liz Cheney ruthlessly eviscerate her cowering colleagues like a lioness gnawing on a carcass in an NC-17 nature documentary. But it was during that savage meal that something rather alarming occurred to me.

Liz might be winning the argument for history and in my living room. But in present-day Republican politics, that anonymous “what’s the downside for humoring him” moron actually won the day. And not just that day, but today. Because despite how brutally and blatantly their strategy in managing Trump’s psychopathy failed, Senior Republican Officials (SROs) are still employing it.

This time around, Joggin’ Josh and Cowardly Kevin are taking things even further than was initially suggested. Don’t forget the second half of stupid little aphorism from the SRO quoted in the Post. It went like this: “what is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time . . . he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.” 

The SRO’s argument was premised on the (wildly off-base) presupposition that the former guy was just gonna stomp his feet and smear his ketchup on the wall and then move on from the whole coup thing after a few weeks of sucking on his Bedminster-branded pacifier.

You see, back in November 2020, at least the SROs thought that there was an expiration date on their cowardice. They figured that, come January 20, 2021, Trump would be gone and they would no longer have to humor him.

Today the strategy has been modified only in the removal of an expected end date.

The new posture the GOP Smart Set has settled on for dealing with Trump is: “What’s the downside for humoring him . . . until he dies.”

Iwant to be clear about my meaning here: This is not a cheeky exaggeration.

In Thank You for Your Servitude, Mark Leibovich quotes a former congressman who made this macabre wishcasting explicit:

A former Republican congressman told me recently that the party’s only real plan for dealing with Trump in 2024 involved a darkly divine intervention. “We’re just waiting for him to die,” he said.

To paraphrase Rick Page, hoping for death is not, in fact, a strategy.

In the meantime the rest of the Republicans are just gonna keep giving Trump made-up “Champion of Freedom” awards for his “hard work,” inviting him to campaign with them, and joining his scam social media site—until he keels over and they don’t have to go along with the charade any longer.

Even allegedly Trump-skeptical Republicans who have said explicitly that they would prefer the party move on from TFG to a campy tribute artist like Ron DeSantis, argue that the party is best off by continuing to humor Trump’s delusions. And that they should continue even after he is defeated.

An article in National Review made this case last week, arguing that DeSantis’s first “commander-in-chief test” was defeating Trump without alienating the voters that want a MAGA autocracy, because if he were to win the Republican primary without the support of this post-liberal wing it would be a “Pyrrhic victory.”

Once upon a time, National Review was throwing Birchers out of the party. Now they’re saying that the Great Conservative Hope must do whatever it takes to keep them in the party, up to and including pretending he believes our democracy is illegitimate.

This view about how important it is that DeSantis not alienate the people who want to overturn American democracy was echoed by the DeSantis stans on Twitter who mocked my suggestion that the Florida governor signal some daylight between him and Trump on the issue of couping. Keep in mind none of these tweeters were saying that they believed Trump’s lies. They just believed that it’s too much to ask that a politician refuse to humor them.

The obvious subtext to this argument is that even in a hypothetical scenario where DeSantis or someone of his ilk were to dispatch Trump, that victorious candidate would still be forced to continue humoring Trump’s mania in the general election and beyond so as to keep the coalition together.

You wouldn’t want to do anything that might limit the enthusiasm of the Very Fine People who came to the National Mall on January 6th, right? Right?

What’s the downside?

This past week in Arizona we got to see what the “what’s the downside for humoring until he dies” strategy looks like in a live campaign setting.

Over the weekend, Mike Pence, Doug Ducey, Rusty Bowers, and the other Good Republicans™ were campaigning for gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson in her upcoming primary against MAGA Drag Queen Kari Lake, who meanwhile was holding a Poconos-standup-act-meets-Confederate-monster-truck-rally with Trump across the state.

There was much scuttlebut in the political class about how this was the first step in the coming internecine Trump-Pence war. But the attacks seemed awfully one-sided.

At the Lake rally, Trump called Bowers a “RINO coward.” Lake said Biden was an “illegitimate president” and that “Trump won.” And Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Blake Masters said they were planning to “prosecute Fauci.”

Meanwhile in the Pence camp the #war was a little more muted. The former VP sent two tweets that had the political class buzzing but . . . well, see for yourself.

Some people! Bold! Who might he be talking about there? The person that sent the mob to kill him? Or the RINOs who are still obsessing over Ronald Reagan?

What are “yesterday’s grievances” that he is referring to in tweet two? Trump and Stop the Steal? Or one of the many other grievances of yesteryear shared by Republican politicians?

Those seem less like a full-frontal political attack and more like the kind of tweets you would send if you were adapting your messaging to not make a certain person too upset.

At the rally itself Pence did not admonish Lake over the fact that she continues to advance the absolutely insane election lies that nearly led to his death. That topic didn’t come up.

Instead Pence lambasted her over her . . . past support for Barack Obama.

Some war.

As for Robson, the candidate Pence supports?According to a recent interview, she’s still not sure the election in 2020 was “fair” to Trump.

At least that’s what she says. And maybe Mike Pence agrees. Who’s to say? Not him.

What we do know is that neither Robson, nor Pence, nor anyone else who wants a future in Trump’s party will ever tell us what they really think, as long as Trump is still alive and kickin’.

Instead they will soldier on. Playing the same big game of pretend with our democracy in the balance.

After all, the downside for humoring him for just a little more time is likely to be felt by other people. And the upside of humoring? That accrues directly to the Republicans who want power.

But don’t worry. Eventually they’ll be able to tell the truth. Probably.

As long as he’s the one who croaks first.