Donald Trump holds such a tight grip on the GOP that he has enjoyed the deference not only of his allies, but of most of his rivals, as well. But at least one of his competitors appears emboldened by his fourth and most recent indictment: Mike Pence, who was cartoonishly loyal as Trump’s vice president, is said to be eager for a showdown with his old boss. “It’s let’s-get-it-on time,” top Pence adviser Marc Short told Politico. “We’ve been waiting for this for a while.”
How sturdy is this spine that Pence has allegedly grown? That remains to be seen. His previous, highly-publicized shows of audacity weren’t exactly symmetrical to the political abuse Trump has subjected him to— and the talk he and his team have been doing recently qualifies as “tough” only in the loosest definition of the word. But it’s more than some of his fellow 2024 hopefuls have been able to muster.
Ron DeSantis—who is polling a distant second behind Trump, and has been on the receiving end of his most impassioned vitriol—reacted to the former president’s indictment with the usual nonsense about Trump being the victim of a political prosecution. “I think it’s an example of this criminalization of politics,” the Florida governor claimed. (That’s in keeping with his campaign’s curious debate strategy, as reported by the New York Times Thursday, to “defend Donald Trump.”) Vivek Ramaswamy, who is nipping at DeSantis’s heels, chimed in with some drivel of his own. “As someone who’s running for President against Trump,” he said, “I’d volunteer to write the amicus brief to the court myself: prosecutors should not be deciding U.S. presidential elections.” That, of course, is not at all what’s happening. But don’t tell that to South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who has tried to position himself as the most unifying of this rag-tag bunch of Republican aspirants, but has barely made a blip in the polls: “We see the legal system being weaponized against political opponents,” Scott told reporters at the Iowa State Fair. “That is un-American and unacceptable.”
Compared to all that, Pence’s boilerplate “no one’s above the law” statement almost sounds assertive.
It isn’t, of course. This new, bold Pence still hasn’t gone to the lengths Chris Christie, Will Hurd, and Asa Hutchinson have (though Christie did say he viewed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s decision to prosecute the former president as “unnecessary,” given his earlier federal indictment by Jack Smith on similar charges). But those candidates are running specifically as anti-Trump Republicans, and none have made much of an impression on the polls so far (though Christie did pull ahead of DeSantis in New Hampshire in one Emerson College survey). To defy Trump even a little would, for Pence, constitute something of a shift in his political identity.
Which is probably for the best. That identity—as Trump’s top toady—has the former vice president averaging just over five percent in polls, not much better than Nikki Haley, who has spent her campaign trying to walk a similar tightrope as Pence: running against Trump without upsetting him or his movement too much. That might keep them from getting some dopey nickname hurled at them on Truth Social. But it does nothing to rationalize the existence of their campaigns, let alone give them a real shot at besting Trump.
Is this actually “let’s-get-it-on time” for Pence? We’ll see. But if not now, as Trump prepares for his fourth arraignment in as many months, it’s hard to imagine it ever will be.
Eric Lutz
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