“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.”
This has been the case historically, where the Republican candidates have demonstrated enviable party discipline and fallen in line after the nominee has been chosen, but Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd have shown themselves to be so duplicitous that they won’t even honor agreements made with other Republicans. The more mainstream candidates like Pence may just figure that this time around there’s nothing in it for them, that they won’t get anything from Trump in return for their endorsement, not even goodwill.
I would hope after Pence’s life was threatened that he’d continue to do the opposite of what Trump wants him to do.
“Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.”
I would bet on that.