Mike Pence says he will not endorse Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy this year.
That’s right—the former vice president of the United States says he no longer can support the one-time president Pence served loyally, even slavishly, for four years.
Pence says the break is based on reasons of principle and policy, not out of any sense of personal animus on his part. He says he has forgiven Trump for summoning a mob to Washington, D.C., and urging it to storm the Capitol with plans to murder the vice president—“Hang Mike Pence”—on Jan. 6, 2021.
No, Pence asserts that his objections to Trump returning to the White House are more high-minded than a desire to strike back at the man who put his life and that of Pence family members who were there with him in danger.
The former vice president says Trump’s continued assertions that Pence had the authority to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election show that the former president won’t honor the U.S. Constitution. So do Trump’s proclamations that he will be a dictator and set aside the Constitution.
Pence also points to Trump’s plans to increase the national debt and possibly soften his commitment to end abortion in America as deviations from the true conservative faith.
Those reasons, not personal pique, are the reasons the former vice president no longer can support the man who once put him a single heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
Skeptics on both the right and left remain unconvinced.
They argue that, from Trump’s emergence as a political figure, he—to use the immortal phrase of a long-dead conservative congressman—“has had no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat does for a marriage license.”
The former president’s attempts to suppress certain religious faiths and use military force to intimidate peaceful protestors—both clear violations of the Constitution—occurred with Pence standing beside him.
Similarly, those dubious of Pence’s motivation note that—again, while he was vice president—Trump expanded the national debt faster in four years than any president in American history.
And Pence uttered not a word of protest.
Abortion may be a different story.
It was during Trump’s presidency that Republicans—largely through the clever if unscrupulous machinations of then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky—were able to pack the court.
The elevation of three rightwing justices provided the votes necessary to ignore a half-century of precedents and overturn Roe v. Wade.
The Dobbs decision threw decisions about laws regarding reproductive rights back to the states. Many states, including Indiana, responded by passing draconian abortion bans.
The voters’ reaction was swift—and intense. Even in red states such as Kansas and Ohio, strong majorities pushed back against abortion bans and defended individuals’ rights to make their own choices about their bodies and when and how they would start their families.
Trump has the moral convictions of a weathervane. Reading the voters’ mood, he tried to have things both ways—boasting that he made the Dobbs decision possible at times while saying at others that he wanted to preserve some access to abortion.
When it comes to abortion, Pence is not a weathervane. He is a true believer, one who would like to take the Dobbs decision several steps further and impose a nationwide ban on abortion.
The skeptics have a point.
It cannot be a revelation to Pence that his former boss possesses more pliable moral principles than the onetime vice president does. After all, Pence spent four years watching Trump strike one pose after another, adhering to his commitments with all the constancy of a butterfly in a tornado.
That said, the why of Pence’s decision to abandon Trump is less important than the fact that he made the decision.
The former vice president—once the darling of evangelical conservatives—said that Donald Trump is unfit to serve as president of the United States.
Critics can carp that Pence comes to this resolution late. They have a fair point.
But neither they nor anyone else can dispute that Pence was not well-positioned to observe and evaluate how Trump handled the great powers of the presidency.
That Mike Pence says his onetime boss cannot be trusted with the presidency again matters.
It matters a great deal.