Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty
The Republican National Convention, which kicked off Monday in Milwaukee, is a super-powerful magnet for anyone with even a passing connection to conservative politics. To enter the Fiserv Forum downtown, I first had to pass by Erik Prince and Kari Lake. Ron Johnson flits about, fending off fans. As I spoke with delegates in the concourse during the afternoon session, Jason Chaffetz periodically passed by, like a small piece of space junk orbiting the Earth. I’ve seen conservative influencers and candidates I’ve forgotten about. I just saw Mike Lindell. But one person is conspicuously missing. Has anyone seen Mike Pence?
On Monday, as Republicans awaited Trump’s announcement of J.D. Vance as his next running mate, the man who had joined him on the ticket twice and served alongside him as vice president for four years was very conspicuously not there. Not inside the beefed-up security perimeter. Not in Wisconsin, so far as I can tell. And very much not endorsing Trump. If the biggest story among convention-goers was Trump’s hunt for a running mate, then the defining story of his candidacy, as Matt Gertz recently wrote at Media Matters, is what happened to his old one.
The short of it, as you’ll recall, was that Trump pressured Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021. After Pence refused, Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to physically stop the certification. Some members of the mob shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” Interestingly, that was not the final straw for Pence—who said this spring that he had “forgiven” the former president, but that he could not endorse his campaign, in part, because of his recently declared opposition to banning TikTok. But it was the final straw for Trump.
This falling-out over whether the last vice presidential nominee should have accepted the election results was why we were spending our Monday waiting for the white smoke that would portend a new vice presidential nominee. And Pence’s legacy was shaping how Trump’s followers viewed the job itself. When I spoke with supporters of the Republican nominee on Monday, the takeaway from that episode, and the first administration as a whole, was clear: Trump needed someone who would stand by him no matter what.
“I don’t even want to say,” said Rose Roque, a Florida Republican, making a face, when I asked her about the party’s previous next-in-line.
But her daughter, Rose Rodriguez, was willing to go further. “He betrayed his country,” she said, referring to Pence’s decision to certify the Electoral College results on January 6. “Although he thought he was doing the correct thing, according to him, he let himself be poisoned. And I think he already was poisoned—he came in already being that way.”
“If Gen. Flynn would have been vice president,” Rodriguez continued, referring to Trump’s short-lived national security advisor Michael Flynn, who had suggested after the 2020 election that Trump could order the military to seize voting machines. “Gen. Flynn would have done things by the constitution, he would have upheld the constitution and done the right thing and we wouldn’t be in the mess we are.”
Pence “seemed to be trying to do a balancing act and it never really worked,” said Michael Rosen, a New Jersey Republican who was standing by a big Trump 2024 sign outside the arena. Trump needed “Someone who’s gonna work with him and not gonna leave him in a lurch at the end. [Pence] should have worked with Trump when he was going through all that stuff instead of throwing his hands up and saying ‘I’ve got no control.’ We were kind of left with nothing.”
“He was a great vice president until he wasn’t,” said Mike Bassett, a Nevada Republican. One of his top requirements for a vice president was “loyalty to Trump.”
I did talk to delegates who wanted governing or managerial experience, strong communication skills, and even a bit of gender or racial diversity from their VP. Republicans floated Byron Donalds and Tulsi Gabbard. More than one person pined for Glenn Youngkin. But Pence had cast a shadow over the search. So much so, that after I finished talking with Rosen, another New Jersey Republican, Rimma Yakobovich, piped up with her own suggestion.
There was one clear way to get a Republican running mater who absolutely wouldn’t “stab him in the back,” she said. Her idea? “Don Jr.”
