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.
The Hoosier was a relative unknown—running a losing campaign to get reelected as governor—when Trump selected him as his running mate. He didn’t add all that much to the ticket but it looked good to have a midwestern governor who was a former congressman and credentialled on the important pro-life question. The RNC liked it—especially as he was a known entity and played by their rules.
Over and over again, Pence, without fanfare once adjacent to the Oval Office, worked to undo or mitigate Trump’s effect. His later chief of staff, Marc Short, was nothing less than a mole in the White House and an outright anti-Trumper. Having been purged multiple times by MAGA, the swamp kept belching him out into administration posts until he finally landed in the White House.
Pence’s entire staff from senior to junior had one thing in common—their disguised opposition to the radical and unconventional Trump and his policies. His foreign policy team was pure State Department orthodoxy, and many were on loan from the very swamp called “Foggy Bottom.”
Pence’s defense attachés were hardline neocon hawks. Other appointees were crazy libertarians, a Koch-Short-Pence predilection. Pence’s evangelical buddy, former U.S. Senator Dan Coates of Indiana, got a plum post as national intelligence director only to make a fool of both Trump and his policies at places like the Aspen Security Forum. He finally got fired. Pence still defended him.
Pence often said one thing and did another. He was two-faced and duplicitous. Some people on Trump’s team knew this and avoided him. They tried to go around him or not include him, if possible. Trump himself either suspected Pence’s disloyalty or simply tolerated him, hoping for the best. He made a mistake delegating duties to Pence, including the COVID-19 response he botched, which cleared the way for Dr. Anthony Fauci to dominate policy and public relations and all that has resulted in the aftermath.
The early tell-tale incident that set Pence apart and as pawn of the deep state was the Michael Flynn affair. It was Pence who insisted on dumping the general, who was Trump’s designated national security advisor. By accepting the FBI’s line that Flynn had allegedly violated the never-used Logan Act, Pence played right into the Russia collusion hoax. I know this firsthand as Pence also worked to kill my own appointment as ambassador to the European Union.
At the Munich Security Conference in early 2017, he bent over to the demands of the former communist EU foreign minister from Italy, Federica Mogherini, and also encouraged two shameful démarches by the European Union to the State Department and then-Secretary Rex Tillerson, who was never on the Trump team, either. Tillerson committed the globalist sin of equating his own nationally appointed position with whatever mess Mogherini’s mandate involved.
The EU said I was “malevolent” because I challenged their globalist ideology. The EU, in a rare move, condemned me as persona non grata, a distinction no other American has ever earned. My two largest supporters were Steve Bannon inside in the White House and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom.
So, did Trump challenge globalism? He sure did. But not “humble” Pence—he was a weak-kneed Republican with his own ambitions, sometimes hidden but right below the surface he badly wanted and thought he was the one who deserved the highest brass ring. In his mind he was a master politician while Trump was just a personality.
Nowadays, Pence is heckled and booed as a traitor. He does not garner much praise or acclaim in most hard-core Republican circles, and most importantly in those aligned with Trump. He would like to be seen as a 2024 Republican contender. He is not. He thinks he has support. There is none. There is no presidential timber there.
It should be clear by now Judas Pence is not going to be president of the United States, nor is he going to be Trump’s running mate again. Judas’ theological role as the metaphysically necessary incarnation of human disloyalty to the divine imperative parallels well with the story of Geo Deus, up to and including the part where Trump will rise again from what his pharisaical enemies thought to be oblivion. Pence, recalling his past life as a radio huckster, will be reduced to doing pillow and pain relief commercials on cable TV but that will probably not include any for testosterone.
Fooled once, the voting public will not be fooled twice—and Donald Trump won’t be either.