You might think that anyone angling for a slot on Donald Trump’s ticket might be a tad concerned about what happened to the last guy who had the job. You know, the guy who found himself running for his life on Jan. 6, 2021, as the frothing Trump fans who stormed the U.S. Capitol searched for him, gleefully chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
But at least one wannabe vice presidential pick isn’t losing any sleep over it: Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether Trump’s treatment of Pence—and his support for the rioters who wanted to kill Pence—concerned him, Vance simply denied that Pence ever had anything to worry about in the first place.
“Kaitlyn, I’m extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger,” Vance said. “I think politics and politics people like to really exaggerate things from time to time.”Â
This would surely be a relief for Pence, who has been under the apparently mistaken impression that things were actually bad that day, and it was Trump’s fault.
“[H]is reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable,” Pence said last year.
Members of Pence’s Secret Service detail were even concerned for their own safety, according to testimony during the House select committee’s investigation of Jan. 6.Â
“The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives,” one witness testified. How they would be able to protect Pence if they were concerned their own lives were in danger is an interesting question Vance doesn’t address. But he’s got a way of making all of that irrelevant anyway.
“A lot of folks in the Democratic Party, Kaitlyn, act as if January 6th was the scariest moment of their lives,” he said. So there you have it. Pence, apparently a member of the Democratic Party, is probably exaggerating about the dangers of Jan. 6 anyway.Â
For that matter, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley—who was widely mocked after video was released of him appearing to run for his life through the Capitol—is probably just another one of those exaggerating Democrats too. Sure, he calls himself a Republican, and sure he gave a raised fist of apparent support to the protesters earlier that day, but his colleague Vance says the violent mob Trump incited was no big deal because Vance is a big Trump fanboy now.
This is the same Vance who in 2016 called Trump “noxious” and “reprehensible” and wondered, in a message to a friend, whether Trump “might be a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he might be America’s Hitler.”
But that was then, and this is now, and now is when Vance is one of the contenders on Trump’s VP list—which means that whatever he might have once thought of Trump, and whatever cruelty and harm Trump might have inflicted on his first vice president, simply doesn’t matter now.
