Mike Pence, former Vice President of the United States under the Administration of Donald Trump, has given this Sunday his version of the assault on the Capitol in January 2021 by a horde of his followers, focusing on the role that Trump played in the action. “The words of the president that day at the rally [previo al asalto] were reckless, it is clear that he decided to be part of the problem. They put me and my family and everyone on Capitol Hill in danger,” said Pence, whose name sounds like a likely presidential candidate in 2024, in an interview with the ABC News television network.
Pence said he was particularly upset by a Trump tweet posted as the insurrection was taking place. In the message, the former president accused him of “not having had the courage to do what he should have done” after his subordinate rejected pressure not to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020, the usually formal act, of pure procedure , which Pence was supervising inside the Capitol when rioters vandalized the building. With those words, Trump turned his number two, who like other congressmen, both Democrats and Republicans, had to lock himself in a bunker in the Capitol. Participants in the mob cheered his advance to the cry of “Hang Mike Pence.” A war cry that the tycoon has not disavowed even after what happened.
“I turned to my daughter, who was nearby, and said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. What it takes to uphold the law is courage,” said Pence, who will publish his memoirs on Tuesday. So Help Me God (May God help me), the ritual phrase of the oath of public office on the US Constitution. It is the first interview that the former Republican vice president grants since the insurrection.
In the recording, at Pence’s home in Indiana, the interviewer asked him, without much luck, about Trump’s possible presidential career, if he himself will run as a candidate, if the tycoon’s influence in the party hurt Republicans in the mid-term elections and his theft of classified documents when he left the White House. Since he stepped down from office, Pence’s public message has been to staunchly defend his administration’s achievements while also distance himself from Trump.
Pence’s television appearance, in the midst of an election not as positive for the Republicans as they had hoped -they have not achieved control of the Senate, and that of the House is likely to be more succinct than expected-, contrasts with his refusal to testify before the congressional committee investigating the January 2021 coup attempt.
The fact that his name appears among those being considered as possible Republican candidates for the 2024 elections adds interest to an interview that did not discover anything new and that his critics call opportunistic, an exercise in propagandistic calculation, while observers analyze it in detail as a possible thermometer of the correlation of forces within the party and, above all, of the existing discomfort about the results at the polls. In short, the phase in which the battle for the soul of the Republican Party finds itself.
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