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Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment was: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” This weekend, Mike Pence—like most of the GOP field—struggled mightily to criticize Donald Trump while barely mentioning Trump’s name.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Scared to Say His Name
Let us remind ourselves to speak well of Mike Pence for one moment. Not only did he do his constitutional duty on January 6, 2021, thereby averting the collapse of the U.S. government and the bloodshed that likely would have followed, but lately he seems to be exerting visible caloric effort to criticize the man he served as vice president. And yet, like so many other leading Republicans, Pence seems to be under a kind of necromancer’s curse in which he risks being struck dumb when trying to say Donald Trump’s name.
Yesterday, the CBS correspondent Major Garrett asked Pence whether he’d still vote for Trump. It was an opportunity to knock a softball out of the park. Instead, he flailed.
Major Garrett: Would you ever vote again for Donald Trump?
Mike Pence: Look, I don’t think I’ll have to. I have to tell you, everywhere I go—
Garrett: That wasn’t the question, Mr. Vice President. Would you ever vote for Donald Trump again?
Pence: Yeah. Yeah, I know what your question is, but let me be very clear: I’m running for president because I don’t think anyone who ever puts himself over the Constitution should ever be president or should ever be president again.
Well, that’s one way to go. Another would be to say, “I know from personal experience that Donald Trump is the most dangerous man ever to sit in the Oval Office, and I will do everything I can to stop him.” To his (again, very small) credit, Pence did open the interview by using Trump’s name long enough to say that he was “wrong” on January 6. Trump, Pence said, “asked me to put him over the Constitution that day, but I chose the Constitution and I always will.” When asked if he would testify against Trump, Pence again whimpered: “I have no plans to testify, but people can be confident we’ll—we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes, and we’ll just tell the truth.”
This is not exactly breathtaking defiance. Nor should we be overly impressed by an American politician affirming that he would honor an oath to the Constitution he’s repeatedly taken in the past. But in these strange times, we take what we can get. Still, Pence was clearly uncomfortable with the question and did everything he could to leave Trump’s name out of the discussion, which is an odd thing to do when you’re heading a campaign against your own former running mate.
Likewise, consider Ron DeSantis’s grudging acceptance that Trump lost the 2020 election. “Of course he lost,” DeSantis said in an interview with NBC News today. “Joe Biden’s the president.” And Trump’s lies about the election? “Unsubstantiated,” the Florida governor said on Friday. DeSantis has been insistent that the 2024 election should be about Joe Biden, but he seems unwilling to deal with the reality that taking on Biden requires defeating Trump first. A New York Times report referred to the NBC comments as “Mr. DeSantis’s increasingly aggressive stance,” which I suppose is true if you think of the move from “nothing” to “something” as “increasingly aggressive.”
Why are Republicans so scared to mention Trump, even at this late date? There are three reasons, two of them grounded in sheer cowardice and the third derived from a hallucinatory primary strategy.
The first and most obvious problem for GOP candidates is that barking back at Trump infuriates the Republican base, many of whom live in districts and states that Republicans care about. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson are willing to go after Trump because they are both men with thick skin—but also because they have almost no chance of gaining the GOP nomination. George Will said it first, but it bears repeating: The modern GOP is the first American party that fears its own voters.
Few candidates want to cross Trump and then endure his vicious attacks, which is understandable but hardly an example of leadership. (Trump has already blasted “Liddle’ [sic] Mike Pence” on his social-media platform, Truth Social, accusing him of being an ungrateful loser who has “gone to the Dark Side.”) And although too many Americans are no longer shocked by it, Trump’s attacks create real problems of security when he zeroes in on his perceived enemies: Look at how much effort New York; Washington, D.C.; and, apparently, Atlanta have had to undertake just to indict or prepare to indict Trump.
Even on a less dire level, however, no one running for president—or trying to hold together what’s left of the Republican Party—needs the headache of a brainless brawl with Trump. From DeSantis and Pence on down, the GOP field avoids invoking Trump’s name, treating him (as I wrote in 2021) as if he were some sort of ancient god or mystical Balrog who will appear and unleash chaos at the mention of his name.
Finally, the GOP primary candidates seem to share a vanity-driven belief that each of them could inherit Trump’s voters once Trump is out of the race because of his legal troubles, or when some other act of God takes him off the board. Somewhere, there’s a strategist telling his client that but for Trump, voters would stampede toward, say, Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy. This is what the Bulwark writer Tim Miller has called “a fantasy primary,” the one being held inside the heads of “Republican elites who secretly loathe Trump and are hoping that voters will soon come to their senses” and pick someone else.
Now, it’s true that if Trump were physically incapacitated—and I do not wish any ill health on the former president—then, yes, Republicans would have to find someone else. Short of that, however, Trump is clearly going to run even if he is incarcerated. (No law or constitutional rule prevents such an attempt.) He will continue to attack American institutions, and he will go on making barely veiled threats of violence, as he has done repeatedly, even while under indictment.
Meanwhile, other Republicans are unable to say Trump’s name, press the case against him as unfit for office, or make any of his alleged criminal activity relevant to GOP voters. Back in March, I wrote that Pence “had his one moment of courage, and there will be no others.” Unfortunately, I was right. At this point, other Republicans will head into 2024 unable to mimic even Pence’s sole day of decency.
Related:
Today’s News
- Tou Thao, a former police officer convicted for his role in the killing of George Floyd, was sentenced to almost five years in prison by a state court.
- Ukraine claims that it has detained a Russian informant who it says was part of an apparent plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelensky via air strike.
- City officials in Juneau, Alaska, declared an emergency yesterday because of record glacial lake flooding that destroyed at least two buildings.
Evening Read
The Weaponization of Loneliness
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.
There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation.
Read the full article.
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P.S.
When you work for a magazine, people send you stuff, such as announcements of presidential campaigns. This is how I know that Steve Laffey is running for president.
I note with local pride that Laffey is the former mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, a city not too far away from where I live in the Ocean State. (I have never met him; it’s not that small a state.) He served one term as mayor, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006, and lost. He almost ran for Rhode Island governor in 2010; instead he moved to Colorado, got into the governor’s race there in 2013, pulled out of that one, and then tried to get the GOP nomination in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District in 2014 (and lost).
I wasn’t paying much attention to local politics back then, so I can’t really judge whether Laffey was any good as a mayor. But he seemed a throwback to the old fiscally conservative and socially moderate tradition of New England Republicans, a breed now all but extinct in the GOP. According to ABC News, Laffey has almost no money and subatomic poll numbers—he has not yet placed on a national poll—and so he will be unlikely to qualify for the GOP debates. That’s too bad, because one of his slogans is: “I did it for Cranston, I will do it for America,” which is kind of charming, and I would have loved to see Donald Trump even try to counter that by insulting the good people and city of Cranston.
— Tom
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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