Editor's note
John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
Mike Pence made news the other day.
The Indiana native and former vice president of the United States during Donald Trump’s first presidency took issue with his former boss.
Trump has stated, among other departures from fact, that Ukraine started the war it now wages with Russia.
Pence would have none of it.
"Mr. President, Ukraine did not 'start' this war,” Pence posted on X. "Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth."
Pence also posted a story from Fox News confirming Russia’s assault on Ukrainian sovereignty.
The post was part of a pattern for Pence.
He did not endorse Trump during the 2024 presidential election. He also has delivered muted but unmistakable criticisms of the president in the years since the two men served together.
And, of course, there was the ugly, ugly end to their official relationship.
After Election Day 2020, Trump pressured Pence to help him steal that presidential election. When Pence refused—arguing, correctly, that he lacked the constitutional authority to do what Trump demanded—Trump summoned a mob to Washington, D.C. The president stirred the passions of the crowd to a murderous rage and urged those gathered to direct their anger at Pence.
The mob marched off to the U.S. Capitol with its members screaming, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Pence made it to safety only with the aid of the U.S. Secret Service.
Since then, Pence has said that he bears Trump no personal animosity for trying to get him killed, but he has made clear he does not think Trump has the character to serve as president.
Pence’s condemnation of Trump’s lies about the Russia-Ukraine War is but the latest example of him trying to establish a conservative argument against the president’s rule.
This has made the former vice president a lonely man.
The president’s MAGA base long ago turned against Pence, labeling him a renegade and a turncoat for resisting Trump’s unconstitutional attempts to hold onto power following the 2020 election. When Pence launched a 2024 presidential campaign, he didn’t even make it to the Iowa caucuses, largely because the Republican base that had sustained for so long had abandoned him.
In favor of Trump.
Nor did Pence’s ouster from MAGA’s ranks win him many new friends among his former political opponents.
Citing the former vice president’s enthusiastic cheerleading during most of Trump’s first presidency, Democrats and other Trump opponents dismissed Pence’s opposition as a self-interested conversion.
Too little, too late, they said.
But given all that the president’s critics say is at stake—the fate of the United States as a self-governing society and a representative democracy—can they really afford to be picky about the timing and nature of anyone’s conversion to the cause?
The reality is that those who are concerned about Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on American institutions and constitutional safeguards need all the friends and allies they can find.
Mike Pence is doing two important things here.
The first is that he’s making a case that what Donald Trump is doing is not conservative. Conservatives historically have revered and fought to preserve American institutions, traditions and constitutional safeguards. Trump is determined to trash all three.
Because Pence’s conservative credentials are impeccable, he can make that argument in a way that few others can—and, in doing so, he can create space for other principled conservatives, however recently they might have rediscovered those principles, to make their opposition to Trump’s assaults on their values known.
The other thing Pence is doing is making clear that the truth matters.
In this Trump era, far too many Republicans and conservatives have become comfortable with the practice of lying to secure a political advantage, however temporary that advantage might be.
Pence is working to separate conservatism from mendacity.
This shouldn’t be controversial, but it is in Donald Trump’s America, where routinely lying is not just condoned but venerated.
I’ve known Mike Pence a long time. He and I agree that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west—and just about everything else is up for debate.
I know how devoted he has been to the GOP and what a wrenching thing it must be for him to criticize a Republican president.
But he’s doing so because he loves his country.
And that merits respect.
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