Since his 2020 defeat, Donald Trump’s offensive against Mike Pence has been fairly narrow in scope: The former president believes his former vice president betrayed him by failing to go along with a scheme to overturn election results Trump didn’t like. It’s what led Trump to put Pence in danger on Jan. 6, and it’s led to years of condemnations about Pence not being corrupt enough by the former president’s standards.
But in recent days, Trump has widened the aperture.
Last week, for example, the Republican mocked Pence for generating small crowds as part of his struggling 2024 presidential bid. On Saturday, Trump used his social media platform to make his harshest comments to date:
“WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side. I never told a newly emboldened (not based on his 2% poll numbers!) Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’ He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy. I once read a major magazine article on Mike. It said he was not a very good person. I was surprised, but the article was right. Sad!”
To be sure, this is the sort of strange and juvenile rhetoric we’ve come to expect from the former president, but these aren’t the sort of comments he’s made about Pence. Up until very recently, Trump was content to condemn his former vice president as a nice guy who succumbed to cowardice and refused to go along with an allegedly illegal scheme.
Now, Trump wants the public to believe Pence is small, “delusional,” and a bad person who’s gone “to the Dark Side.”
Stepping back, there are a handful of dimensions to this that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that while an incredible number of people who worked on the former president’s team now hold him in contempt, it’s also true that Trump also seems to hate many of them right back.
It’s also worth pausing to appreciate the fact that Pence is learning a valuable lesson: No matter how much sycophantic loyalty he’s shown the former president, it’s simply not enough. It’s happened before and it’s all but certain to happen again: Those who align themselves with Trump, and go to great lengths to make him happy, inevitably disappoint him, at which point they become the target of lazy smears and ugly insults.
But let’s not forget that it was just last week when the former president was charged with a variety of felonies regarding his post-defeat actions, and during his arraignment, a judge reminded the defendant not to mess with witnesses — and by any fair measure, Pence is a witness in this case. Indeed, the Republican Hoosier has spent the last several days pushing back against false claims peddled by Team Trump, and Pence hasn’t ruled out the possibility of being a witness for the prosecution. “I have no plans to testify, but people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth,” Pence said during an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” It’s against this backdrop that Trump is targeting his former vice president in ways we haven’t seen before. Watch this space.
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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