November 15, 2022

"What, for his part, did Trump really think of his vice president? In one unintentionally revealing anecdote..."

"... Pence relates how he attended the musical 'Hamilton' and, at the curtain, heard one of the cast members issue a statement on behalf of the show expressing anxiety and alarm over the administration’s lack of commitment to protecting a diverse America. 'I wasn’t offended by anything he said,' Pence writes, but Trump 'was outraged — mostly as a New Yorker. "Broadway is almost like going to church," he told me.' When Pence declined to turn the episode into culture-war point-scoring, Trump 'good-naturedly' admonished him: 'You took the high road. I never take the high road.' Somehow one doubts that Trump intended that as a compliment."

From "Mike Pence highlights his heroic hour, and sidesteps the rest/In his memoir, 'So Help Me God,' the former vice president writes of his outrage at the Capitol invasion but is generally soft on President Trump" (WaPo).

Here's my blog post from the time. I was mainly concerned that Mike Pence was put in physical danger.


40 comments:

RideSpaceMountain said...

The mistake wasn't taking the high road. The mistake was seeing Hamilton.

"You went to Broadway. I never go to Broadway. I take the high road" - RideSpaceMountain

Gusty Winds said...

'You took the high road. I never take the high road.' Somehow one doubts that Trump intended that as a compliment.

When dealing with a warped and declining culture, like a fawning audience at "Hamilton" on Broadway..."the high road" is capitulation. Democrats claim to take the high road, but never do. It's just empty rhetoric. Just like "protecting democracy". Doesn't mean shit.

In the end Mike Pence's "high-road" on J6 has now permanently cemented absentee voter fraud, ballot harvesting, and post-election ballot curing. He had the constitutional authority to send the electors back to the corrupt states (PA, GA, WI, MI, AZ) and cowered in his most important moment. Now, thanks to Mike Pence, it is here to stay.

Mike Pence is 2023's Liz Cheney. DeSantis should stay far, far away.

Joe Smith said...

Pence might just be the biggest empty suit in history.

He always seemed a bit creepy to me.

Not Biden 'pre-teen-sniffer' creepy, but odd nonetheless...

Michael K said...

Pence was a squish as Governor of Indiana. He backed down over a challenge on the RFRA. He was what Schweiker would have been if Reagan was elected in 1976.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

I was never thrilled with Trumps choice in Pence. Not anything to do with Pence - he's a good guy and he was a solid red state governor.
Trump had a chance to nominate someone from a purple state or someone who could grab more middle-of-the-road voters. To me Pence was too safe and too red-state. Not a big deal - as Trump/Pence won in 2016 - thank goodness. Beating Hillary will always be the high point. Too bad Trump didn't capitalize on that high mark. Instead, the deep state got the upper hand.

Comment above has nothing to do with the booing. In deep Blue NYCity - the 'right' will be booed. Pence understood this and didn't let it ruin everything. That is the mature response.

Ride Space Mountain - - yeah -that's MY operating procedure. Stop paying for the left's tickets. They hate us.

RideSpaceMountain said...

There is precious little in this world that is more high class, more haute kultur, than waiting for the privilege to spend money to attend a performance of queer black males singing and dancing in 18th century European cravats and stockings. I mean you of course could watch Ru Paul's Drag Race...but that's free! When people pay for NYC queer black singing and dancing in wigs and waistcoats, gay singing and dancing in wigs and waistcoats they shall have!

Where do people think they are!?! Bozeman Montana!? This is the high road known as Broadway baby!

Carol said...

I admire Pence but he really is an old-school pussy next to Trump. And he's still trying to play Mr Nice Guy wrt his experience as VP.

Pence gets no respect from any quarter and I'm afraid he'd never get anywhere running for president.

And I don't know whether someone that good would make an effective president or not.

gilbar said...

please tell me AGAIN? Why Trump picked that guy? Didn't he think he'd win Indiana anyway?

Achilles said...

Pence was Trump's first personnel mistake.

There is no possible peace with the GOPe CoC crowd.

They have betrayed their voters repeatedly over and over and over again.

What is interesting is that Desantis supporters constantly refer to these failures and their answer is to... go with the guy who is taking CoC money and hiring the DC consultants to run his campaign.

Gunner said...

Pence made sense in 2016 when Trump was not trusted by Christians, but he should have been shuttled off for 2020. He gained no new voters and Trump needed someone to appeal to the working class.

lonejustice said...

Gusty Passing Wind wrote:

"Mike Pence is 2023's Liz Cheney."

And Trump chose him as his VP. But of course, it wasn't Trump's fault that he chose Pence. It was someone else's fault.

Meade said...

“Trump needed someone to appeal to the working class”

He did? Didn’t Trump himself appeal to working class voters? If anything, Trump could’ve used more appeal to the professional class voters.

Drago said...

Gunner: "Pence made sense in 2016 when Trump was not trusted by Christians,..."

Correct.

Gunner: "... but he should have been shuttled off for 2020."

Possibly. But you can't really talk about shuffling Pence off without identifying who would take his place and what the pros/cons of that person might be.

rcocean said...

Pence thinks this makes him look good, which is why he's a GOPe loser. He went to a SJW play on Broadway with his liberal wife to show how "with-it" and "elite" he was. He's supposedly a born again Christian, what exactly was "Christian" about this play? The profanity? The worship of atheistic Hamilton (look it up)? Giving $$ to anti-Christian broadway producers and performers?

But lets ignore that. Pence thinks that not fighting back, and "being above it all" when treated rudely and trashed for being a Republican is somehow a good thing. Bush and Romney have the same attitude. The result is demoralization of your voters. Why fight the Left, when people like Pence don't? Why get upset at leftwing rudness and contempt, when people like Pence don't?

I can remember being upset at the rudness shown Pence, and now I feel like an idiot. He didn't care, and it was dumb of me to care. Remember that wimp/loser you knew in HS PE class? The guy was who always getting bullied? You'd tell him fight back, maybe even stuck up for him once or twice, but after a while you just figured the guy liked being bullied, and stopped caring. That's Pence.

Same with Bush and Romney. WHo knew that they didn't really DISlike the liberals that were calling Nazis/Hitler/Creeps/etc., no the people Bush and Romney really disliked were the Republicans who stuck up for them!

Drago said...

lonejustice: "And Trump chose him as his VP. But of course, it wasn't Trump's fault that he chose Pence. It was someone else's fault."

Once again, literally no one making that argument anywhere.

But thanks for at least trying.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Should West Side Story (1957) have ended with a solemn declamation: every POC life matters, no bail no jail, and we're looking at you, President Eisenhower? Wouldn't that amount to an admission that the play was a failure, or they weren't really trying to deliver art in the first place? Wouldn't there be a kind of gracelessness and lack of gratitude in a big Broadway show ending like this? Fiddler on the Roof: anti-Semitism everywhere we look, and you are not doing enough, President Johnson?

rcocean said...

Like someone up thread, I was pleased when Trump chose Pence. I thought, ignorantly, that the guy was a sincere member of the Religious Right, and it would please alot of those types that had voted for Cruz. And during the Trump presidency, Pence APPEARED to support Trump and his policies.

Now, we know he was just playing George Bush to Trump's Reagan. Another Estblishment GOP type. I'm still confused why he didn't tell Trump straight out and in writing that he was going to wimp out on Jan 6th. Any way, this is Pence's last moment in the sun. He was a zero before Trump, and he'll go back to being a zero.

boatbuilder said...

He wasn't offended by being publicly lectured and abused for his alleged racism (and that of the administration and voters who he is supposed to represent) at an event for which he publicly grossly overpaid to pay tribute to the triumph of "diversity" over veracity?

What the hell is wrong with him?

This is the same guy who won't meet with a woman without a third-person chaperone being present.

I used to think this was smart. Now I think he's just a punching bag. "Don't blame me--I am spotless!"

Gusty Winds said...

Blogger lonejustice said...
Gusty Passing Wind wrote:

"Mike Pence is 2023's Liz Cheney."

"And Trump chose him as his VP. But of course, it wasn't Trump's fault that he chose Pence. It was someone else's fault."


I'd imagine this was Trump's choice. Nobody is claiming what you state. I certainly didn't

Pence was a benign choice in 2016. At the time he was a harbor to Trump's tempest. And as stated above, Pence helped Trump solidify his support with Christian conservatives.

Choices Pence made on J6, and the torch he will now carry passed to him by Liz Cheney are his own.

Gusty Passing Wind farts in your general direction.

Achilles said...

gilbar said...

please tell me AGAIN? Why Trump picked that guy? Didn't he think he'd win Indiana anyway?

Trump was trying to placate the CoC wing of the party.

The first person to come out and say that Trump trusting these traitors was a mistake, the biggest mistake of his presidency, and that he made this mistake dozens of times all through out his presidency wins my support.

Even at the end Trump was willing to work with the DC swamp. He was always a deal maker.

Trump is not going to be beaten by Desantis if Desantis continues to cuddle up with McConnell and the GOPe. Everyone in the country hates DC including the left. Working with CoC moneybags is the wrong answer.

Trump will be beaten by someone who comes out and talks like Pinochet. This person wont necessarily be right or left.

They will just want to unapologetically got to war with the swamp and their WEF/Globalist masters and rail against Trump's constantly trusting these people.

rcocean said...

So why did Trump choose Pence? Simple, if you remember no one wanted to be Trump's VP. He was supposed to be a racist/bigot/homophobe who was going to lose in a landslide. Very few R pols even attended the 2016 republican convention, let alone made speeches. Cruz sulked and cried for weeks after losing and only reluctantly gave Trump a grudging tepid endorsement. Then in his speech Cruz said it was OK to oppose Trump!

Further, Trump wanted a solid republican religious conservative. Remember? He was supposed to be liberal on social issues who was just pretending to be socially conservative. Those reasons are "why pence".

rcocean said...

Just remember the rule: Trump is always to blame.

If someone attacks Trump, he deserved it somehow.
If someone stabs Trump in the back, he deserved it for picking a disloyal subordinate
If Trump does something good, it was due to other people.
If the MSM Lies about trump, that's Trump fault for giving them the opening.
If his Cabinet members screwed up - that's Trump's fault, because he should be doing their job.

BTW, none of this applies to any other Republican President. Just Trump.

Michael K said...

Trump will be beaten by someone who comes out and talks like Pinochet. This person wont necessarily be right or left.

They will just want to unapologetically got to war with the swamp and their WEF/Globalist masters and rail against Trump's constantly trusting these people.


Not a bad theory. The Pinochet type might be the next step after the Democrats trash the economy and lose a war. Russian missiles in Poland today. Brandon is getting his war while he parades around in a Mao jacket.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Hilarious how Trump-humpers can divine Trump's every chess move.

Jim at said...

Pence might just be the biggest empty suit in history.

Barack Obama owns that title. And it's not even close.

Sebastian said...

'I wasn’t offended by anything he said'

Why not? What then does it take to offend Pence?

Drago said...

Althouse Blog Commissar (self-appointed): "Hilarious how Trump-humpers can divine Trump's every chess move."

Appropriately vague and non-specific so that you don't actually have to, you know, like challenge something specific and show why its wrong.

Well done.

Gunner said...

Trump's 2020 voter share went up with everyone except for White men. All he had to do was repeat his 2016 performance. He did not win as many professional Whites back then as Hillary did, but it didn't matter.

Drago said...

Pence might just be the biggest empty suit in history.

Jim at: "Barack Obama owns that title. And it's not even close."

Careful now. Barack Obama is highly respected by the GOPe-ers. They can't get enough of him. The entire Bush clan seems to desire nothing more than to have Barack pat them on the head in public, to the cheers of The View's audience.

Drago said...

Sebastian: "Why not? What then does it take to offend Pence?"

Easy. Tell him there are some Deplorables out front that want to meet with him to share their policy priorities.

Gunner said...

Specifically, Midwest White working class men especially needed to be bolstered. Hell, Kid Rock would have made a better VP candidate than Mike Pence to that demographic.

Lurker21 said...

Most of Congress is more like Pence than like Trump and always has been. If a Republican manages to win high office, it will in no small part be due to people like Pence, and the new officeholder will have to be able to work with them. Pence is too annoyingly self-righteous, but Trump had already lost the fight when he expected Pence to save him. It was too late, and the chaos at the capitol only made things worse. Trump should have recognized that his own mistakes and lapses had more to do with his defeat than whatever Pence did or didn't do.

n.n said...

The acute tolerance of divergence.

tim in vermont said...

Wow, Trump was teasing Pence for being a little slow, and Pence proved it by putting it in his book.

tim in vermont said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tim in vermont said...

"Hilarious how Trump-humpers can divine Trump's every chess move."

Wow, that was deep.

Joe Smith said...

'Barack Obama owns that title. And it's not even close.'

But at least he was successfully elected...twice.

In political terms on a national scale, Pence was/is a non-entity...

rcocean said...

I wonder if Ike ever saw West side story on Broadway? Maybe if Mame dragged him to it. IRC, he was mostly into movies (especially westerns), bridge, and reading western novels. FDR loved movies and detective fiction.

Ike was supposed to be the "stupid old army general" who didn't like culture. Unlike super-sophisticated JFK. Of course, we now know JFK hated all that Arsty-farsty stuff and ducked out every chance he got. Supposedly, he never stayed to the end of any movie unless it was James Bond. His favorite author was Ian Fleming. All his supporters pretended otherwise.

The real culture vulture was Nixon. Who played the piano rather well.

Robert Cook said...

"Hilarious how Trump-humpers can divine Trump's every chess move."

Maybe because he's playing checkers. Trump lovers see in Trump a man of deep and ineffable thoughts and brilliant strategies. He's just a con man who has a way with his marks. There's nothing mysterious about him or his actions. I'm not saying he's unintelligent, but he is interested only in serving himself.

Drago said...

Robert Cook: "I'm not saying he's unintelligent, but he is interested only in serving himself."

Marxists are always the best mind-readers.........that's how Stalin knew who was guilty and who wasn't. Just like Mao...and Pol Pot....and, well, you get the idea.