The day Mike Pence got fed up with Trump
For nearly four years, the vice president held his tongue in the face of his boss's urges, something critics say allowed the president to do the worst. This was the week he resisted Trump's insults and pressure.
For Vice President Mike Pence, the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and eleven months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Trump's ego, after so many moments of biting his tongue and swallowing his pride in which he resorted to strategic silence or bombastic adulation to make his boss like him again. the president cursed him.
Trump was furious that Pence refused to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed him incessantly, alternating between flattery and intimidation. In the end, just before Pence left for the Capitol to oversee the counting of electoral votes last Wednesday, Trump called the vice president's residence to try to put pressure on him one last time.
"You can go down in history as a patriot," Trump told him, according to two people who were aware of the conversation, "or you can go down in history as a coward."
The clash between the two highest-ranking elected officials in the United States unfolded dramatically when the president publicly excorrated the vice president at an incendiary rally and sent his agitated supporters to the Capitol, whose building they invaded, some chanting: "Hang Mike Pence ”.
After being evacuated to the basement, Pence crouched there for hours as Trump tweeted an attack on him instead of calling to see if he was safe.
It was the extraordinary breaking of an alliance that had already survived too many challenges.
The loyal lieutenant who had hardly ever disagreed with the president, who had honed every possible fracture in the end, reached a moment of decision that he could not avoid. He was going to defend the election despite the president and despite the mob. And he would pay the price against the political base that he had once hoped to harness in his own run for the White House.
"Pence was faced with a decision between his constitutional duty and his political future and he did the right thing," said John Yoo, a legal expert that Pence's office turned to. “I think he was the man of the moment in many ways, for both Democrats and Republicans. He did his duty even though he must have known in doing so that it probably implied that he would never be president. "
Jeff Flake, a former Arizona senator, one of Trump's most outspoken Republican critics and a longtime friend of Pence who distanced himself from him over the president, said he was reassured that the vice president had finally taken a stand.
“There were a lot of times when I wished he had parted, talked, but I'm glad he did when he did,” Flake said, “I wish he had done it sooner but I'm definitely grateful that he did it now. I knew he would. "
Not everyone was so kind to Pence and criticized him for saying that following the Constitution was not exactly something to idolize him for and noted that his deference to the president for almost four years was what allowed Trump in the first place carry out your attack on democracy.
"I'm glad he didn't break the law, but it's hard to say anyone is brave for not helping to bring down our democratic system of government," said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-New Jersey. "He has to understand that the man he has been working for and who he has loyally defended is almost entirely responsible for creating a movement in this country that seeks to hang Mike Pence."
The rift between Trump and Pence has dominated his final days in office, not least because the vice president has the power under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove the president from office with the support of the cabinet. The House of Representatives voted Tuesday demanding that Pence take such action or else he would impeach Trump.
On Tuesday night, Pence sent a letter to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi refusing to take such action. But Trump was already so eager about it that after five days of treating the vice president coldly, he finally invited him to the Oval Office Monday night to try to mend the relationship. The official description of the hour-long conversation is that it was "good"; the unofficial description is that “it was not substantial” and it was “forced”.
This confrontation is the third time in 20 years that an outgoing president and a vice president had conflict in their final days in office. After Vice President Al Gore lost his presidential campaign in 2000 he had a bitter fight with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office over who was to blame. Eight years later, within days of leaving his term, Vice President Dick Cheney reprimanded President George W. Bush for refusing to pardon I. Lewis Libby Jr., the president's former chief of staff, for perjury in a case of CIA leak.
Trump took office without a real understanding of how his predecessors had handled relationships with his running mates. In the early days, when it became clear that there would be no organization chart or formal decision-making process, Pence became a regular presence in the Oval Office, simply showing up with no agenda and often entering a discussion for which he did not. he had received informational material.
Every morning he would arrive in the West Wing, inquire about the time the President was coming down from the residence, and simply settle in the Oval Office for much of the day. He was seldom formally invited to anything and his name rarely appeared in official meeting records. However, he was almost always around.
Calm and unflappable, Pence became the confidant of cabinet secretaries and other officials who feared Trump's wrath and gave advice on how best to bring up uncomfortable issues with the president without provoking him.
Not angering Trump was "one of his key goals," observed David J. Shulkin, former secretary of Veterans Affairs. He "He was trying very hard to walk a very difficult line." But that meant that Pence's views were often unclear.
"Were the policies and statements issued the ones he fully agreed with?" Shulkin asked. "Or was it his strategy, better to be in the room, better to be a trusted party to help moderate some of those strategies and the way to do that is not to disagree in public? I think it was really difficult to know exactly what his position was. "
Pence ultimately found that loyalty to Trump only matters until it no longer matters. Tension between the two had risen in recent months and the president was privately complaining about Pence. The vice president's allies believe Trump was partly provoked by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, who told him that Pence's aides were leaking information to the press. That helped create a toxic atmosphere between the two even before election day.
When Trump's efforts to overturn the election results were rejected each time by judges and state officials, Trump was told, incorrectly, that the vice president could end the final confirmation of the election of president-elect, Joseph R. Biden.
Pence's attorney, Greg Jacob, investigated the matter and concluded that the president had no such authority. At the urging of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, two of his attorneys, Trump insisted.
Pence's office solicited further opinions from constitutionalists, including Yoo, a prominent conservative at the University of California Berkeley campus who worked for the Bush administration.
Last week in the Oval Office, the day before the count, Trump pressured Pence in a series of meetings they held, including a meeting that lasted about an hour. John Eastman, a conservative constitutionalist from Chapman University, was present and argued to Pence that he did have such a faculty.
The next morning, hours before the vote, Richard Cullen, Pence's personal attorney, called J. Michael Luttig, a former appeals court judge revered by conservatives, and for whom Eastman worked as a clerk. Luttig agreed to quickly write his opinion that the vice president had no power to change the outcome and then posted it on Twitter.
Minutes later, Pence staff incorporated Luttig's reasoning, citing him by name, in a letter that disclosed that the vice president had decided not to try to block voters from the Electoral College. When contacted on Tuesday, Luttig said that helping to protect the Constitution had been "the greatest privilege of my life."
After the irate call in which he cursed Pence, Trump fired his supporters at the rally against his own vice president. Alluding to so-called "Republicans in name only," (RINOs), he said, "I hope you don't listen to RINOs and the stupid people you listen to."
"He set Mike Pence up that day by putting that burden on him," said Ryan Streeter, who served as Pence's counsel when the vice president was governor of Indiana. “He is quite unheard of in American politics. That such a president betrays his own vice president and encourages his followers to attack him is inconceivable to me. "
By then, Pence was already in his caravan heading to the Capitol. When the mob stormed the building, Secret Service agents evacuated him, his wife, and his children, first to his office on another floor and later to the basement. His agents asked him to leave the building but he refused. From there he called legislative leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the president of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but not the president.
Later, a Republican senator would say that he had never seen Pence so upset, feeling betrayed by a president for whom he had done so much. For Trump, an adviser said, the vice president had entered "Sessions Territory," an allusion to Jeff Sessions, the attorney general whom the president humiliated before firing him. (A vice president cannot be fired by a president).
The day after the siege of Congress, on Thursday, Pence avoided Trump and did not go to the White House. The next day he went, but spent much of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office building, where he threw a farewell party for his staff.
But his aides said Pence didn't want to become a vengeful president's long-term nemesis so he was back in the West Wing by Monday.
Unlike Trump, Pence plans to run for Biden's inauguration and then hopes to split the time between Washington and Indiana, perhaps launching a political leadership committee, writing a book, or campaigning for Republicans running for Congress.
But no matter what happens next, he will always be remembered for a moment. "We are very fortunate that the vice president is not a fanatic," said Joe Grogan, who until last year was Trump's national policy adviser. "In many ways, I think he vindicates Pence's decision to have stayed until now."
