Loyal to God and Trump, Mike Pence Defends His Record

As much as Mike Pence likes to project an air of beatific calm, in his memoir, “So Help Me God,” the former vice president writes that even he has his breaking point: “They never gave any thought to the anxiety they were causing the American people, the damage they were doing to our institutions and the credibility of our elections.”

The “they” in this instance aren’t the right-wing rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, erecting a gallows and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Pence is referring here to “the collusion crowd,” which kept talking about Russian interference in the 2016 election — liberals like the MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow.

It’s a nifty bit of whataboutism from Pence, who tries his hardest in this memoir to have it all ways at once. Even when he does castigate the Trump supporters who called for his head, he repeatedly describes Trump as “my friend.” This fondness for someone who egged on the mob that threatened to kill him is an especially degrading form of self-abasement that’s embarrassing to watch.

But then Pence has ample experience trying to square the unsquarable. As Trump’s running mate, the devoutly religious Pence lent a sheen of evangelical piety to a reality-TV star who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals; as Trump’s vice president, Pence pivoted from his previous commitment to laissez-faire conservatism to run defense for Trump’s escalating trade war.

His declarations of fealty were so frequent and fawning that a historian of the vice presidency started calling him “sycophant in chief” — which made Pence’s refusal to do what Trump wanted him to do on Jan. 6 all the more startling. Here was somebody who for four years had seemed more than willing to go along with pretty much anything Trump wanted. Yet Pence drew the line at a command to not certify the election, even when it was clear that his own life was in danger. Why?

Pence, for his part, says it came down to his own reverence for the Constitution. He describes agonizing over his decision in the days leading up to Jan. 6: “I prayed for wisdom to know the right thing to do and the courage to do it.” He knew that his role in the certification process was purely ceremonial; the framers would never have vested in one person the power to overturn an entire election.

But he also knew that doing his duty “would be hurtful to my friend.” The bulk of “So Help Me God” is given over to tracing his relationship with Trump, much of it in minute yet obfuscating detail. At around 500 pages, Pence’s book, like other memoirs by establishment Republicans who threw their lot in with the Trump administration, is exceedingly long — perhaps because he realizes at some level that he has a lot of explaining to do.

Not that Pence’s explanations amount to much more than self-serving spin. Despite some complaints about Trump’s “reckless words” on Jan. 6, Pence suggests that Trump was pushed to the brink by others. (Pence even blames the anti-Trump Lincoln Project as well as Democrats for “trying to goad me into doing less than my duty so as not to offend the president.”) Trump is otherwise depicted as somebody who was unfailingly dedicated to the highest office. Any scandal is dismissed as a nothingburger cooked up by “the woke left” and “the media.” Sure, Trump could say all kinds of weird, aggressive things, but Pence presents this coarse rhetoric as part of a grand strategy. He was playing good cop to Trump’s bad cop. “I was prepared to deliver a firm message in my low-key manner,” he writes. “It was Trump’s job to bring the thunder.”

Some of Pence’s contortions are so elaborate that they’re worthy of Cirque du Soleil. A chapter on Covid gets especially creative. Trump’s bumbling, combative Covid briefings are depicted as wonderfully comforting, instead of utterly confounding. “There was a method to the way he handled the briefings,” Pence writes, apparently with a straight face. “I think he felt that seeing him and the press argue was in some way reassuring to the American people that life was going on.” Pence, who presided over the White House’s troubled coronavirus task force, is relentlessly upbeat, despite a pandemic death toll of more than 377,000 Americans by the end of 2020. “I know we saved millions of lives,” he insists, ignoring ample evidence to the contrary. “The nightmare scenarios facing our health care system never came to pass. Only in America.”

Pence sounds supremely confident for someone who was teetering on the edge of political oblivion as recently as 2016, when Trump picked him as his running mate. At the time, Pence was running for his second term as the governor of Indiana; his approval rating had been tanking, even among the state’s Republicans, but he waves all that away and breezily states, “My re-election was all but assured.”

Besides, Pence tells us, everything is part of God’s plan. “I believe that Providence put President Trump behind that desk,” he writes. Pence’s own role was similarly preordained. “You know,” he recalls telling Trump, “I believe God put me next to you to help you become successful.”

And Trump was successful, at least according to Pence’s calculations, installing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade (“Ours would become the most pro-life administration in history,” Pence boasts). Pence is also chuffed to report that he had a hand in hiring a number of high-level officials, including the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. What he neglects to mention is the fact that many of the people he helped bring to the White House had ties to the Koch family — and that, as Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker, a steady stream of Koch money has long buoyed Pence’s career.

But then the Kochs have been a frequent target of Trump’s ire, and part of what makes “So Help Me God” such a strange document is how it reflects Pence’s awkward attempts to do two wildly incommensurate things: state how “angry” he was about the rioters of Jan. 6 while gingerly trying not to alienate Trump’s supporters, many of whom cling to the myth that the 2020 election was “stolen.” He keeps gesturing vaguely at “voting irregularities,” and maintains that the Republican members of Congress who objected to the electoral count were doing the right thing. In the months between November 2020 and Jan. 6, Pence felt heartened by Trump’s lawsuits to overturn the election: “I remained hopeful, as we all did, that those legal challenges would succeed.”

Amid so much tortured rationalization, the most obvious conclusion to draw from “So Help Me God” is that Pence continues to have political — perhaps presidential — ambitions and so finds himself in bit of a pickle. If he had refused to certify the vote, that would have been it for him — no matter what happened after that, he would forever be seen as Trump’s lackey. But since he did certify the election, he has to find a way to placate the Trump supporters he’ll inevitably need, especially because his own political inclinations — favoring corporate interests along with extreme religiosity — aren’t all that appealing to the American public.

Threading such a tiny needle seems impossible on the face of it, but if anybody has had the miraculous experience of failing upward, it’s Pence. In Mayer’s article for The New Yorker, a lawyer in Indiana recalled Pence as a young (and not particularly exceptional) attorney. “There were dozens of guys like that,” the lawyer said. “But the great American story is that a guy like Mike Pence is now vice president.” Or as Pence himself likes to put it in his book: Only in America.