Judas Pence

Mike Pence isn’t fooling anyone and will be neither president nor Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024.

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, we read that Judas committed the unthinkable betrayal of Jesus. Judas Iscariot was of course one of the Twelve Apostles. He is notorious for betraying Christ by disclosing Jesus’ whereabouts for 30 pieces of silver. Judas brought soldiers to arrest Jesus after the Last Supper in the Garden of Gethsemane and identified him with a kiss. Jesus was then arrested, tried, and crucified.

Mike Pence, the former vice president, betrayed President Donald J. Trump and is in many ways a modern-day Judas. No one wants him to hang himself as Judas did in utter shame, but he should recede into the horizon, sort of like the other inconsequential vice president, whatshisname, also from Indiana.

Most people on the Right have come to believe Pence is a turncoat because of his failure to recognize a (regular, legal, constitutional) motion signed by at least one congressman and one senator—support Al Gore couldn’t muster—in the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. Every count (there were six) entailed two hours of floor time before ratifying the formal election result, allowing time for the evidence of voter fraud to enter the record. He refused, which is the immediate cause of the protesters getting angry at him. At the very least he could have delayed for 10 days the formal election result to investigate voter fraud. It is certainly the case that he has gone on to criticize and even mock President Trump as “wrong.”

Pence legitimized the illegitimate election of the usurper, Joe Biden. He attended the inauguration and conceded defeat. It makes him look stupid on legal matters and surely less than loyal. “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not,” Pence declared. The foulest of straw-men arguments, since nobody thinks the vice president has unilateral authority on anything.

In other words, Pence surrendered to the Democratic Party in his final days. He caved to the pressure to concede unnecessarily and, in fact, did not defend the U.S.Constitution he swore to uphold.

Fact is, Pence betrayed Trump long before that day in January 2021. He was never really a believer in populist politics, economic nationalism, or Trump’s America First agenda. He was instead a saboteur, a “NearlyTrumper,” a good old GOP stalwart, the enabler of many acts against Trump and his appointees, as well as a free rider, on the coattails of the Orange Man.

As governor of Indiana, Pence kept an open Bible on his desk. He was known to practice the Billy Graham rule of never being alone in private with a woman who was not his wife. This most pious and devoted disciple has now been unmasked as a betrayer of the Greatness Agenda.

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