Donald Trump is blaming Mike Pence for the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and he's using some pretty strong logic: If Pence had already been doing what Trump wanted, Trump wouldn't have incited an insurrection.
"Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”
See! If Pence had participated in a peaceful coup attempt by refusing to do his job of certifying the election, the violent coup attempt might never have happened.
In other news, if mommy and daddy had let the toddler play with matches, the toddler wouldn't have had that temper tantrum.
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Trump was lashing out because, on Saturday night, Pence voiced the kind of criticism of Trump's role in Jan. 6 that he has rarely been willing to share.
“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said at the Gridiron Club Dinner. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”
History—but not Mike Pence. Pence is fighting a subpoena to talk to the special counsel investigating Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump won’t repay the favor by holding off on criticizing Pence, though.
Trump continues to insist that Pence absolutely could have refused to certify the election in an attempt to keep Trump in office despite his decisive loss.
“He had the right to send them back, otherwise they wouldn’t have changed the Voting Act,” Trump told reporters. “They all said, ‘He didn’t have any rights at all, he was a human conveyor belt, he had no rights even if it was fraud.’ And then the day after he did it, they said, ‘Now we’re going to change it so he doesn’t do it.’ Meaning, you understand that, meaning he had the right to do it.”
The Electoral Count Act was changed so that there could be absolutely no ambiguity or doubt whatsoever, thanks to Trump's efforts to claim that Pence had powers he did not have. If Mike Pence, the top suck-up of the Trump administration, could have found a way to justify refusing to certify President Joe Biden's win, he would have. He looked for any out he could find—but it wasn't there. Here's Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's reporting on a conversation between Pence and former Vice President Dan Quayle as Pence wrestled with what to do about Trump's demands that he refuse to certify the election:
Over and over, Pence asked if there was anything he could do.
“Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away,” Quayle told him.
Pence pressed again.
“You don’t know the position I’m in,” he said, according to the authors.
“I do know the position you’re in,” Quayle responded. “I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power.”
Trump’s claims that Pence did have the authority to do otherwise have to be taken in the context of Trump asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him “find 11,780 votes,” or his considering replacing the acting attorney general with someone who would use the weight of the Justice Department to pressure Georgia lawmakers to overturn the results of the state’s presidential election. And the context of Trump inciting a crowd to go to the U.S. Capitol to try to stop Congress from certifying his loss. What Donald Trump said and did is no measure of the law.
Mike Pence is again seeing what his loyalty to Donald Trump earned him: nothing. Well, scratch that. It’s earning him Trump not having slapped an insulting nickname on him, like the series of monikers Trump has been workshopping for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Pence’s loyalty is earning him faux-pitying, condescending statements like, “I guess he figured that being nice is not working. But, you know, he’s out there campaigning. And he’s trying very hard. And he’s a nice man, I’ve known him, I had a very good relationship until the end.” If Trump felt threatened by Pence’s potential 2024 presidential candidacy, though, you know the condescension of “he’s trying very hard” would flip to whatever insult Trump felt would be most damaging. (And Trump usually knows what his fans will respond to.)
Trump’s comments about Pence’s role in Jan. 6, though, make absolutely clear—as if there were any doubt—that Trump has not only not repented his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he remains certain that his cause was righteous. That knowledge should define the media coverage of Trump's current presidential run. There can be no doubt about what Donald Trump thinks of democracy, how much he respects the will of the voters, or his willingness to act on that. He is kicking off the 2024 campaign as someone who still believes in his right to overturn an election, and whose only regret about his past attempt to do so is that it didn't work. If reporters don't make that clear every time they write about him, they're failing to cover the race fairly.
Judd Legum is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. Judd joins Markos and Kerry to talk about the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the recent revelations of behind-the-scenes deceit practiced by everyone from on-air host Tucker Carlson, to the owner of it all, Rupert Murdoch.
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