Mike Pence Is Useless

For some reason, Pence is unwilling to acknowledge or accept that the damage to the future of his electoral career has already been done. We’ve all seen it on television: Rabid supporters of Trump literally marched through the halls of the Capitol looking to lynch Pence. He has no constituency for a Republican electorate eager either to vote for Trump again or to push for a slightly more disciplined upgrade like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. To the extent that moderate or “Never Trump” Republicans might form a coalition to offer an alternative, Pence would never in a million years be their choice to run the country. The “Pence bloc” simply does not exist.

This is the ongoing tragedy of Mike Pence. Vice presidents are typically useless things—theirs is a job with no real purpose beyond being a living human vessel, on hand in the unlikely event the president is rudely thrust into the Great Beyond; Pence, in four years, certainly made little effort to imaginatively expand the job’s slight boundaries. But it’s hard for an ex–vice president to be more useless than this. Pence has only tepidly condemned a man who was itching to throw him to the wolves to gain another term in office; he nearly died serving perhaps the most dishonest and dangerous president in American history. And yet, because Pence clings to the hope that a presidential campaign—based around the thin rationale that as the Veep, he was “next in line”—will at least revive his political fortunes if not propel him to the White House, he has refused to say much of anything about Trump beyond occasionally talking up the administration’s meager accomplishments.

As The New York Times reported on Monday, Pence has been traveling “around the country in advance of the 2024 primaries,” attempting to weave around what the paper euphemistically describes as “his fraught positioning.” “Much as he did after the 2020 election, when he tried to keep his tensions with Mr. Trump from becoming public only to have him push them into the light,” write Maggie Haberman and Reid Epstein, “Pence continues to walk a tightrope, trying to make the best of a situation he didn’t seek without becoming openly adversarial to the president with whom he served and who remains the leader of the Republican Party.”