Mike Pence’s doomed campaign was always an exercise in humiliation

Mike Pence did one good thing in his political career. It cost him everything.

Pence has bowed to the inevitable and ended his presidential campaign. He had little choice. His campaign was always an exercise in humiliation.

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While speaking at a hate group summit, Pence also called trans acceptance a “tragedy.”

As a former vice president, Pence should have been a leading candidate for the GOP nomination. Of course, that would have assumed that Donald Trump wasn’t running again. It also would have assumed that Pence could have claimed he was Trump’s most loyal foot soldier.

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Neither turned out to be true. Trump decided to run for president, largely in hopes of staving off the legal peril that he is facing. But the much bigger issue for Pence is that he refused to engage in the conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election. Trump himself told Pence he would “go down in history as a pussy” for refusing to trash the Constitution and did nothing to stop the mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on January 6. (Trump later said the chants were simply “common sense.”)

All the obsequience that Pence lavished on Trump from 2016 on counted for nothing. The comments about Trump’s “broad shoulders,” the boasts about how Trump beat him “like a drum” at golf, the political capital that Pence spent to reassure evangelicals that Trump was going to be okay – it’s all ashes.

Let’s not pretend that Pence didn’t get a lot out of the Faustian bargain he made. His career was as good as gone anyway when he signed on with Trump. As the governor of Indiana, his embrace of an anti-LGBTQ+ religious liberty bill made him so unpopular that the state GOP was happy to see him go instead of having him run for re-election and lose to a Democrat. Once in the White House, Pence was able to spread the damage he could do on a national scale, launching the ban on trans military personnel and pushing for other anti-LGBTQ+ policies in the White House.

Pence’s political career ended on January 6, when he had the courage – finally – to stand up to Trump. But how many other lines had Trump crossed while Pence stood on the sidelines either silent, or worse, applauding? He thought about forcing Trump off the ticket after the Access Hollywood tape became public, but he didn’t. He stood by when Trump praised white supremacists, instead talking about how Trump was uniting the country. Trump wanting a coup was just the last step in a long line of outrageous, immoral actions that the evangelical vice president happily overlooked and even justified.

Now Pence goes into political exile, and it’s a bleak one. He is hated by both sides. Republicans in the thrall of the Trump cult despise him for not embracing the Big Lie about the 2020 election. Democrats acknowledge that he faced great personal danger on January 6 and did the right thing, but they also recognize that he was Trump’s lackey up until the last moment. No wonder only 28% of Americans have a positive view of Mike Pence. It’s unlikely history is going to be much more generous.