"I Got to Get Out of Dodge After Announcing Biden Victory": Pence Will Flee the Country After Presiding Over Trump's Loss in Senate on January 6
December 19, 2020
Vice-President Mike Pence will announce Trump’s loss after Electoral votes are counted on January 6 (Gage Skidmore)
By Hunter
On Jan. 6, unless he fakes his own kidnapping or takes other drastic action, Vice President Mike Pence will preside over Congress as it accepts the Electoral College victory of Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States. He then will immediately flee the country.
No, really! We're not making this up! As reported by Politico, Mike Pence is looking to preside over the acceptance of the Electoral College results, then leave town the very same day to go on a tour of the Middle East and Europe. It would mark Pence's first foreign trip in a year, and is being timed to coincidentally overlap with the days in which Donald Trump is expected to froth and rage more than Donald Trump has ever frothed and raged before. Go figure. It also comes during a spike in the COVID-19 pandemic, which Mike Pence is in charge of combatting, that is causing thousands of American deaths per day. This would be a true problem if Mike Pence actually had real pandemic duties; fortunately, he does not.
In a somewhat satisfying bit of exposition, Politico gives both the cover reason for Pence's sudden interest in going to let's say, um, Israel and Poland, and the closer-to-earth political considerations for Pence’s self-orchestrated temporary defenestration. In premise, Mike Pence will be leaving to promote the Trump-Kushner plan for peace in the Middle East, which now consists of agreeing to sell advanced U.S. weapons to Arab nations in exchange for their diplomatic recognition of Israel. (Since his early candidacy, Trump has focused on the use of the presidency to boost weapon sales, and that is indeed where we quickly ended up.)
In practice, this is fooling nobody: Politico calls the trip the continuation of a "tactic" Pence has been using to distance himself, post-election, from the worst of Trump's fascist declarations of fraudulent voting and election victory. As he has from the beginning of the 2016 campaign, Pence himself has been methodically playing both sides of that fence, both amplifying Trump's asinine claims to Republican audiences and dodging anyone in the press who seeks to question him about it. Also, notes Politico, a last-minute taxpayer-funded trip to Israel is a way for Pence to again boost his credentials with evangelicals.
That’s also a given, since boosting his evangelical credentials and polishing Trump's shoes have been Mike Pence's only noteworthy concerns during his entire stay in office. Mike Pence dreams of having a future political career, after Donald Trump leaves. Donald Trump is thwarting that yet again with suggestions that he will never, ever leave, but instead run for president-slash-antichrist yet again in four years, so that's a bit of a sting to Pence's own ambitions, and it really could not happen to a shallower and more glibly amoral guy.
Anyhoo, it appears this will actually be happening. Pence will preside over the final nail in Trump's reelection coffin, then run immediately to an airport and flee to Europe and the Middle East while the heat dies down. He may or may not pretend that his phone is out of battery during his entire trip, in order to dodge Trump's furious phone calls. He will assuredly not be popping into the White House between his congressional appearance and his flight.
A week or so later, Pence expects the heat to die down and that both Trump and his frothing, violence-promoting fascist diehards will have gotten the worst of their fury out of their systems and gone back to watching television, so he will sneak back to quietly pretend to be a garden vegetable for his remaining few weeks of office.
This is all likely prelude to a spring- or summer-issued book by Mike Pence in which he explains that Donald Trump is still wonderful and is basically the second coming of Jesus, but that Mike Pence is even better so please keep him in mind for your future Republican Party needs. It will be only a ripple in an ocean of similarly premised Republican pleas for redemption, will have a great number of Bible quotes that Mike Pence has never, ever attempted to put into practice except as campaign materials, and will be absolutely insufferable.
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