Pence’s autobiography, to be released November 15.
In former Vice President Mike Pence’s“So Help Me God“ — out Nov. 15 — he describes a scene in November 2020, just after the election, when he and former President Trump met in the Oval Office to review legal challenges with the campaign’s lawyers.
“What began as a briefing that Thursday afternoon quickly turned into a contentious back-and-forth between the campaign lawyers and a growing group of outside attorneys led by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, an attorney who had represented General Mike Flynn.”
After the campaign lawyers gave a sober and somewhat pessimistic report on the state of election challenges, the outside cast of characters went on the attack … Giuliani told the president over the speakerphone, “Your lawyers are not telling you the truth, Mr. President.”
“Even in an office well acquainted with rough-and-tumble debates, it was a new low …. [and] went downhill from there,” Pence writes.
“In the end, that day the president made the fateful decision to put Giuliani and Sidney Powell in charge of the legal strategy … The seeds were being sown for a tragic day in January.”
COMMENT: I haven’t read So Help Me God, and it’s not likely I will. But there’s one bit of data I’ve been trying to glean from it and other places: Does God really want Pence to be president?
I’ve put this question on the Pearly Gates Hotline, but so far the call has not been returned from On High.
But there are more mundane sources. Two I take seriously are veteran investigative reporters Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner, who published an unauthorized Pence biography, The Shadow President, The Truth About Mike Pence, in 2018.
The Washington Post reviewer asked straight out : “Is it God’s plan for Mike Pence to be president?”
Her answer, in sum, was—He [Pence] sure seems to think so.
There are no real scandalous disclosures in The Shadow President, no payoffs to pornstars, no trafficked teenagers or suitcases of Russian oligarchs’ laundered swag. But there’s lots of embarrassing detail about how completely he sold out his onetime rock-solid evangelical notions about truth & the Ten Commandments to spend four years running interference for a narcissistic orange-haired pagan nonstop liar who had plenty of public depravity to spare.
Yet D’Antonio & Eisner conclude that
“Although Pence presents himself as a deeply moral man,” they write, “his record indicates both a ruthlessness and a comfort with aggression that belie this pose.” Thus, he is willing to tie his political future to President Trump, “a man whose immorality in the form of lying, cheating, and deceiving in every aspect of his life, from his marriage to his businesses, had made him a living exemplar of everything that Christianity and conservatism abhorred.”
It’s okay, though, because this is all part of God’s plan — for Pence.
In an interview on CNN, D’Antonio said that ”[Pence’s] decision to accept Donald Trump’s offer to be his running mate — it even goes back much further [in his life]. . . .
[{One of Pence’s college classmates, Scott} Roos . . . said of Pence: “He said that God told him he would be president.”
[Pence] thought God was calling him to, now, be vice president and function as a president-in-waiting.”
. . . [Pence] was, from the beginning of his adult life, a man who thought he was destined for the presidency.
Notions of presidential predestination are hardly rare among the high and striving around Washington and other capitals, be they Christian or other. So if Pence truly believes he’s meant to be back in the White House, next time in the oval office, he would hardly be the only one with such dreams.
Several sources say Pence takes as a personal motto (and guarantee??) a biblical verse from the prophet Jeremiah (29:11): “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
But like many of these texts, the meaning here is not entirely clear; and since it was written 3000 years or so ago, some might think it’s a stretch that it’s meant as a personal message for an individual today.
For that matter, there are numerous other biblical verses which pour cold water on such notions of divinely-granted certainty. One of my favorites is from another prophet, Isaiah, Chapter 55:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. . . .
Even more unsettling are the tart comments of the Sage in the book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 8:16–
“ Whenever I tried to become wise and learn what goes on in the world, I realized that you could stay awake night and day 17 and never be able to understand what God is doing. However hard you try, you will never find out. The wise may claim to know, but they don’t.”
What, “they” don’t? You mean like all the smug battalions of pollsters, pundits and other pontificators who swore on their laptops that Hillary would bury Trump in 2016?
Yeah, my experience is much closer to that of the Sage than the self-assured ex-vice-president.
I’m not predicting that he’ll never become president; like the Sage says, I don’t know what God is up to in the world. (If I did, I’d quit reading politics and play the stock market full-time).
Besides, you ask me Pence ‘s intuition was dead-right about at least one big thing: on January 6, when he said, “I am not getting in that car.”
Why? Well, whatever kind of ride had been planned for him by the Secret Service, they took care to delete every text, voicemail and phone record about it, so nobody would (as yet) ever find out what it was — or whose side they were really on.
If Pence had stepped in that limo, I’d lay odds his book would have been finished by someone else, and maybe include an obituary, and we’d be in an even deeper hell of a mess than we’re in today.
So help me god.
Mike Pence, Famous NOT Last Words: “I am NOT getting in that car.”
reviewer asked straight out : “Is it God’s plan for Mike Pence to be president?”
