My dogs are pretty loyal. I give them loads of treats, ear scratches, and belly rubs, and in return they look at me adoringly while mostly refraining from pooping in or near my shoes.
I could start selling holiday gift baskets stuffed with panda sausage, baby seal tears, and black tar heroin, and they wouldn’t give a shit. They’d still nuzzle up to me and sit in my lap. But if I tried to literally get them killed? I’d like to think they’d be smart enough to make me persona non grata.
But Mike Pence is not one of my lapdogs. He’s one of Donald Trump’s lapdogs, which means he’ll never, ever find a spine.
And so he continues to dutifully carry Trump’s water, even though that guy nearly got him hanged in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Well, Olivia Troye, who served Pence as lead staffer on the White House Coronavirus Task Force before resigning in August 2020 in protest of Trump’s incompetence, is asking why. And she’s not mincing words.
In a scathing op-ed in The Bulwark, Troye wonders what the hell Pence is thinking in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot:
In an opinion piece for the Daily Signal, his first public statement since leaving office, Pence implicitly endorsed the exact lies and conspiracy theories that motivated his would-be murderers, writing, “After an election marked by significant voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law, I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of the 2020 election.”
Yeah, that is fucking weird. It’s like if I tore open a family-sized bag of Funyuns and a 1.75-liter bottle of Kirkland vodka after everything that happened last night. At some point you have to develop a healthy aversion to murderous, toxic assholes, don’t you?
Pence made himself a target by making himself, in the eyes of the mob, just another corrupted gear in the rigged, deep-state machine of government. Now, by winking and nodding at possible “irregularities” and illegitimacy, he’s affirming that view. Does he have Stockholm syndrome? It’s pretty rare for the survivor of a crime to publicly declare that, akshually, their attacker was right all along?
Right. But this is Pence. Just-following-orders Pence. The guy hasn’t had a pair of gonads since he took them out and jangled them in front of a cranky, colicky Trump like a set of musical Fisher Price keys sometime in late-October 2016.
I worked for Pence from May 2018 to August 2020. When the White House formed the Coronavirus Task Force, I was the vice president’s chief COVID-19 staffer. I interacted with him regularly, and I have a pretty good idea of his character. Pence isn’t evil. He’s weak.
Character, says the old saw, is what we do when no one is looking. Pence takes this a little too literally. He will do the right thing, but only if no one is looking and there’s no price to be paid, or if he has no other choice.
Ha ha ha ha! Yeah, I would say she’s nailed it.
Troye also laments Pence’s spinelessness with regard to COVID-19 and the task force he supposedly led. Despite claiming in private briefings that he wanted “just the facts” about the pandemic, Pence eventually bowed to political pressure, writing an infamous Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” in June 2020 — or roughly 400,000 deaths ago.
Yup, that aged about as well as the Americans he almost certainly got killed through his pusillanimous negligence. That is, not well at all.
There’s a lot more, and you should definitely read the entire piece. If you can stomach it, that is.
Oh, hi there! You like free stuff, right? The long-anticipated EPILOGUE to Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump is now available for FREE. Download your copy at this link! And don’t forget to check out the rest of AJP’s oeuvre here. Sit back and enjoy the Trumplessness!