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The time he angered his most patriotic colleagues

The time he angered his most patriotic colleagues

D. Allan Kerr
| columnist

Mike Pence served faithfully as the administration’s second-in-command throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, up until his 2020 election defeat. He held perhaps the best seat in the House of Representatives during the ups and downs of Trump’s time in office – and he decided not to support his former boss in the 2024 election.

Let that sink in for a moment. A former president’s vice president can’t even bring himself to encourage voters to support re-election. That must tell you something.

And this is not an isolated case regarding Trump.

Trump supporters’ knee-jerk reaction will be to call Pence a RINO, which only reinforces my theory that they have absolutely no idea what the term means. And as further evidence, I sometimes see the term “Rhino” which makes no sense at all.

RINO is a longstanding label that stands for “Republican In Name Only,” but in recent years Trump has applied it to any Republican who doesn’t lick their boots. Many of his followers follow suit, unknowingly directing this criticism at those whose republicanism is otherwise beyond reproach. Pence, for example, is a conservative, far more right-leaning than Trump, who first tested presidential candidates in 2000 as the Reform Party candidate.

“I cannot condone this increasing neglect of our allies on the world stage,” the former vice president told KARE 11 News in Georgia last summer. “I cannot condone ignoring our national debt, which reached $35 trillion in the last week alone.”

Most consequential, however, Pence added: “I cannot support President Trump’s continued assertion that I should have abandoned my oath to support and defend the Constitution and acted in a manner that would have overturned the election in January 2021.” “

Sorry, but that doesn’t sound like the speech of a wild-eyed radical or even a RINO. In fact, Pence is so conservative that he can’t bring himself to vote for Kamala Harris at this point.

But he is certainly not alone among those who prominently stood by Trump during his turbulent tenure in the Oval Office. His former defense secretary, Mike Esper, called Trump “a threat to democracy” and warned that a second Trump term would cause the norms of American society to “slowly erode and collapse.”

Just last week, as Trump again threatened political opponents — this time by using the military against “radical left-wing lunatics” — his former Pentagon chief assured listeners that they should take Trump at his word. “If you remember, about a year ago he talked about how a second Trump term would be about retaliation. So yes, I think we should take these words seriously,” Esper said.

John F. Kelly, a retired four-star general in the Marine Corps, first served under Trump as Homeland Security secretary and then as White House chief of staff. Last year, he told CNN that the former president had “nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.” Kelly, whose own son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, also echoed Trump’s infamous description of prisoners of war and people who gave their lives defending our country as “suckers” and “losers.”

Trump, he declared, “has no idea what America stands for and what America is about.”

James Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general who served as Trump’s first defense secretary, previously accused the Republican nominee of “making a mockery of our Constitution.” In an opinion piece published in The Atlantic in 2020, Mattis wrote: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—not even pretend to try.”

Retired Army Gen. Mike Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both Trump and Joe Biden, made headlines this week when, in a new bob, he called Trump a “total fascist” and “the most dangerous person in this country.” Woodward book. Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton — who could never exactly be described as a RINO — called the former commander in chief “unfit to be president.” Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s White House communications director, endorsed Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

“He has no empathy, no morals and no loyalty to the truth,” Grisham proclaimed.

Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, has acknowledged that the candidate’s claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 were “all bullshit” but says he will vote for him anyway.

Dick Cheney, the last GOP vice president in attendance before Pence, supported Harris, as did his daughter Liz Cheney. It would be hard to find politicians who are more genuinely Republican than the Cheneys. And just last month, a group of 10 retired senior military leaders endorsed Harris in a letter criticizing Trump as “a threat to our national security and democracy.”

When Trump critics call the former president a threat to our democracy, his supporters say he never used government as a weapon against political opponents during his first term. What they don’t mention is that he tried like hell. As president, he repeatedly and publicly tried to pressure the Justice Department to take action against Joe Biden — who would later beat Trump by seven million votes in the 2020 election — as well as Hillary Clinton and others. To their credit, his attorneys general, as well as Barr, refused.

“He always told me that we need to use the FBI and the IRS to go after people,” Kelly said of Trump in an interview with The New York Times last year. “It was constant and obsessive and exactly what he claims is now being done to him.”

When he tried to call out the U.S. military against American protesters, men like Esper and Milley dared to oppose him. Esper remembers Trump asking, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The difference in a second term is that Trump won’t be in the company of patriots like these men and Kelly and Mattis – he’ll make a point of surrounding himself with sycophants and idiots, not unlike the people you’re around now sees him around. There will be no one to protect him or the country from his darker, unhinged instincts.

This is part of an ongoing series on the character of the 2024 Republican presidential candidate. D. Allan Kerr is a former longshoreman, former newspaperman and U.S. Navy veteran who lives in Kittery, Maine.