Mike Pence Lands at the Heart of the Trump Indictment
“Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence said in a statement on Tuesday night. But by Wednesday, he was blaming Mr. Trump’s “crackpot lawyers” during a stop at the Indiana state fair and lamenting the indictment in a private call with donors, saying, “I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
It is the latest chapter in a complicated partnership that began with Mr. Trump elevating Mr. Pence to the national stage and now has them colliding in the 2024 Republican primary race, a historic clash in which a former vice president is challenging his presidential benefactor.
Mired in the low single digits in primary polls, Mr. Pence is the best-known Republican at risk of missing the first debate (his campaign manager told donors on Wednesday that he had more than 30,000 of the 40,000 donors required to qualify). Mr. Trump remains overwhelmingly popular in the party, and on the campaign trail, Mr. Pence regularly speaks with fondness about the accomplishments of the “Trump-Pence administration,” eliding that he now sees the Trump half as unfit for office.
“It was a tragic ending to a great partnership that accomplished a lot for the American people,” said Marc Short, who was Mr. Pence’s chief of staff at the end of the administration and is now a top adviser on his 2024 campaign.
From the very start of his campaign, Mr. Pence has been open about his disagreement with Mr. Trump over certifying the election on Jan. 6, 2021. Still, when a transcript of Mr. Pence’s testimony to a Washington grand jury was released last month, it featured 18 consecutive pages that were blacked out, fueling intense speculation about what evidence he might have provided against his former boss.
Source: The New York Times
