Pence’s slowly arriving critique of Trump is his party’s entire problem

Mike Pence’s acute problem on Jan. 6, 2021, gets far more attention than his chronic one.

His acute problem, obviously, was that his boss, the president of the United States, had whipped up an angry mob that was closing in on his position. That Donald Trump was actively telling a mob he knew was surrounding Pence that his vice president was the reason they should be angry. There are countless examples of Trump throwing loyal allies under a bus since he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, but there are no other examples of someone so loyal being so directly endangered by Trump’s abandonment.

But again, that was only the acute problem. The chronic problem extends for years before and after that moment: that Trump never reciprocated any loyalty to his supporters or his staff. That, no matter what, Trump would not create any space for others to succeed if it didn’t benefit him and that he would say whatever he wanted about anyone he chose if he thought it was useful in the moment. He’d been amping up anger at Pence for days before Jan. 6 but making obvious for far longer that if the only barrier between him and what he wanted was Michael Richard Pence, Pence would be tossed overboard.

The reason Trump approached his position this way is simple: At every juncture when the Republican Party could have stood up to him, it didn’t. And that’s what makes Pence’s slowly accreting condemnation of Trump so hard to watch: It’s the person in the bad relationship only slowly being able to verbalize what to everyone else has been so obvious for so long.

And only when he has a book to sell.

ABC News sat down with Pence as part of the rollout of that new memoir, “So Help Me God.” In that conversation, Pence offered the strongest critiques to date of Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6. They were still not very strong.

“The president’s words were reckless,” Pence said of Trump’s tweet blaming him for “not having the courage” to overturn the election results. “It was clear he decided to be part of the problem.”

Yes, that was indeed clear, in the way that it is clear that Vladimir Putin is part of the problem of violence in Ukraine.

At another point, Pence was a bit more forceful, saying that Trump “endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building.” This might have been a sentence in the second paragraph of an editorial about the Capitol riot on Jan. 7, 2021, but Pence is only now coming around to it.

Yet it is remarkable in part because even such wan condemnations are so rare. Sure, you get people like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan bashing Trump, but he’s a blue-state Republican who’s approaching national politics from a different direction. Pence, like most other Republicans with national ambitions (there’s a reason the guy wrote a book), have been generally much more concerned about angering Trump than they have been interested in condemning him.

It’s useful to recall the evolution here. The very first moment in which Trump said something controversial on the 2016 campaign trail came in the first minutes of his announcement in 2015. His comments about immigrants being criminals and rapists received precisely the sort of condemnation you’d expect both from other competitors in the 2016 race and — since Trump was still viewed primarily as a cultural and not a political force — from his business partners.

The expectation was that Trump would be embarrassed and become a punchline to jokes for the eventual Republican nominee. But his willingness to elevate claims about immigration that were rampant in right-wing media (which traditional Republicans wouldn’t touch since they were both false and alienating) was appealing. So was his willingness to take a burn-it-all-down approach to the establishment, including the GOP; his obnoxious comments about Sen. John McCain’s Vietnam War record, rather than dooming him as disloyal to the base, appealed to Republicans who despised the powers that be. By mid-July 2016, he was leading in primary polling.

But — and this is a key point — only with the support of about a third of Republicans. Republicans still saw him then as a containable force because, at least theoretically, he was. Maybe if the party had quickly organized around an alternative, Trump could have been sidelined. But no candidate wanted to be the one to stand down and let someone else be the non-Trump nominee. So Trump was the nominee.

On Oct. 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump was recorded boasting about groping women. A number of Republicans — perhaps thinking that Trump was probably going to lose his election bid in a month’s time anyway — announced that they were breaking with the president. Then Trump, through the grace of the electoral college, won the presidency anyway. Rather than slipping away, his grip on the party tightened.

This is actually where things get weird. Since Trump became president, the Republican Party’s outcomes have been at best mediocre in every election save the 2021 state-level contests in New Jersey and Virginia. The 2017 special Senate election in Alabama and state-level races that year. The 2018 blowout. The 2020 election in which Democrats won the White House and the Senate.

But Trump himself has remained popular with Republicans. He went from 35 percent support for the nomination in early 2016 to favorability ratings in the mid-80s as soon as he took office. They’ve stayed there since. So Trump’s insistence that Republican politicians should be wary of crossing him seemed like they had teeth: He could make or break your primary, he insisted, so you’d better get in line. In 2018, his track record in the general election was mediocre, but his record in the primary was robust. It was the first test of his implied (and sometimes explicit threat) to his own party, and he passed.

The conservative media, including Fox News, found more value in casting criticisms of Trump as the dying gasps of an embattled swamp or the desperate complaints of hangers-on. The Russia investigation, news of which was powered mostly by media reports, was dismissed as biased; a lot of the other things we know about Trump — his effort to pressure Ukraine, his paying hush money to women before 2016, questions about his business practices — were just emerging or yet to come. So Trump had unwavering buy-in from the media his base watched and the complicity of the other leaders they voted for even before the most damaging revelations came to light.

There were condemnations, but the system was ready for that, too. Anyone criticizing Trump was a Never Trumper, someone siding with the anti-Trump elites from the outset. It was a nifty gambit: Anyone of prominence who ended up working for Trump could be dismissed if they turned on him because they had been prominent and therefore suspect. No one was both close enough to Trump to be unable to be cast aside as an opportunist and willing to criticize how he behaved.

The closest the party came before the past week was in the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021. His Cabinet mulled ousting him from office. Some resigned. Pence was reported to have been considering support for an invocation of the 25th Amendment before he publicly rejected the idea.

Behind the scenes, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) appeared to be washing his hands of Trump. That lasted about a week, until his caucus made it clear that they were worried about primary backlash if they bucked the president. Republican favorability of Trump had fallen in the aftermath of the riot — down to about where it was when he took office. By the time President Biden was sworn in, Republicans appear to have settled on the belief that, even after the riot, the political benefits of doing nothing outweighed the benefits of taking on Trump.

Since then, the news for Trump has not gotten better. Investigations into the riot, including by the House, have revealed the extent to which he tried to retain power despite his election loss. His effort to hoard documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort raises real prospects of criminal charges. Yet the mechanisms by which he held power kept chugging along, even with his being booted from social media. Those Republicans who voted to impeach him after the riot declined to seek reelection or lost their primaries — not solely because they bucked Trump but because the rest of the party (like McCarthy) cast them as apostates to the new ideology.

By 2022, enforcing Trump’s position barely even required Trump’s weigh-in. There was a path of no resistance and a path of uncertain resistance, and people just generally opted for the former.

So we come back to Pence, today. He’s already been dismissed as disloyal by the Trump base, based largely on his not doing the thing he couldn’t do on Jan. 6 in the first place. Trump is poised to announce a 2024 bid Tuesday, challenging his party to see whether, this time, they might have an organized response. Perhaps they will: Perhaps the party and the right-wing media universe, believing that Trump really will hurt their 2024 chances — the only Trump effect that the party seems to truly find objectionable — will finally treat criticisms of Trump seriously and as more than anti-Trump, pro-elite whining.

That it has taken nearly two years and a book deal for Pence to have the temerity to describe Trump as “reckless,” though, suggests that the party is still a way from turning on Trump completely.