“Because I had a great successful presidency, and he was the vice president, he should endorse me,” said Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nod. “I chose him, made him vice president. But … people in politics can be very disloyal. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Pence was Trump’s loyal soldier during their tenure in office but encountered Trump’s ire when he refused to bow to his boss’s pressure campaign to block the results of the 2020 election in his capacity as vice president overseeing Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
During the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Videos from the Capitol during the riot show a man with a bullhorn, reading the tweet aloud to others in the mob. Inside, rioters swarmed the hallways, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Trump is so unprincipled that he managed to get it exactly backwards. January 6 is the one time Pence actually stood up and did the right thing. I loathe the man, but I won’t deny him credit where it’s due. I can’t even begin to imagine the level of chaos if he had gone along with Trump and his followers and refused to certify the 2020 election results.
Trump usually does get it exactly backwards, to be fair. If he’s accusing someone of something, it’s because he’s doing it. If he’s claiming something, it’s probably the opposite of the truth. He’s remarkably consistent about it.