If anyone knows how dangerous Donald Trump can be, it’s Mike Pence. After all, the former president put the former vice president’s life in jeopardy early last year, as part of an attempt to overturn an election and retain power illegitimately.
And yet, Pence, as he eyes a national campaign of his own, can’t quite bring himself to stop making excuses for his former boss. The Hoosier sat down with NBC News’ Chuck Todd for an interview that aired on “Meet the Press” yesterday, and it was hard not to notice just how reluctant the former vice president was to hold Trump accountable for, well, anything.
Asked about the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, for example, Pence took aim at Mark Meadows, the then-White House chief of staff. NBC News reported:
Former Vice President Mike Pence says he was “disappointed” in former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for both his role on January 6 and for the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “I was disappointed in Mark Meadows’s performance as chief of staff, particularly at the end,” Pence told “Meet the Press” Moderator Chuck Todd in an interview on Thursday.
“He was receiving terrible advice from people who not only shouldn’t have been in the Oval Office, they shouldn’t have been let on the White House grounds,” Pence said, referring to the former president.
In the same interview, Pence added, “The president’s got to rely on his senior team. … [W]hat frankly all the best White House chiefs of staff have done throughout history, is make sure that the only people that get into the Oval Office are people that have the credibility to be there.”
In other words, as far as the former vice president is concerned, it’s not Trump’s fault that he sought out — and largely acted on — the advice of cranks and charlatans; it’s Meadows’ fault for not keeping the cranks and charlatans out of the White House.
Asked, “Do you think the president committed a criminal act in fomenting the insurrection? Do you think a crime was committed?” Pence replied, “Well, I don’t know if it is criminal to listen to bad advice from lawyers.”
He took the same line to Fox News a day later, adding, “The appointment of a special counsel is very troubling. No one is above the law, but I am not sure it’s against the law to take bad advice from your lawyers.”
Part of the problem, of course, is that this is an extension of a bad argument — Pence would have us blame Trump’s lawyers, instead of Trump himself — but it’s made worse by the fact that the former president didn’t just take his cues from misguided attorneys. Was it the lawyers’ fault that Trump pressed officials in Georgia to “find” votes that would show him winning? Was it attorneys who told Trump to deploy radicals to attack the U.S. Capitol? Did a lawyer tell Trump to put Pence’s life in danger? As for the court-approved search at Mar-a-Lago, Pence whined on “Meet the Press” that the Justice Department should have found “other ways to resolve” the issue. What the former vice president chose to ignore is the fact that officials did pursue “other ways to resolve” the issue: Federal law enforcement obtained subpoenas, made trips to the glorified golf club, and practically begged the former president to cooperate. He refused. But to hear Pence tell it, this mess should be blamed on federal law enforcement, not the former president who took sensitive documents that didn’t belong to him, refused to give them back, and allegedly obstructed the retrieval process. “I’ve not hesitated to criticize the president when I think he was wrong,” Pence told Todd. Perhaps. But given the circumstances, and the former vice president’s eagerness to blame everyone around Trump, maybe the problem is that Pence, even now, doesn’t realize just how wrong the former president was?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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