Republicans Pile on Trump: Et tu, Mr. Vice President?

“President Trump was wrong … And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable … The American people have a right to know what took place at the Capitol on January 6th … his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day … what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.”

Quick quiz - who said that over the weekend? You would be excused for giving an obvious answer, like Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer, or some other Trump-hating Democrat - in which case we would simply write it off as just another in an endless string of partisan attacks on the left’s favorite punching bag.

Or you might reasonably believe it was any number of Never-Trump Republicans. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger spring immediately to mind. Or maybe someone else in the GOP mainstream was looking to derail the former president’s plans to return to the Oval Office?

Bingo. And it wasn’t just any Swamp-based Republican like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who already came to the aid of the uni party establishment in condemning Fox News for daring to show evidence that compromises the company line about January 6. No, it was Trump’s own vice president. Indeed, Mike Pence, in all but announcing his run for president at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington, DC, planted his flag firmly in opposition to the man who elevated him to the second-highest office in the land.

Pence Minus Trump Equals?

Why Mike Pence is even running for president remains a mystery. To put it politely, there is no discernible groundswell for the one-time VP. What does he offer to an increasingly populist base enthralled by Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? He is a political anachronism, a buttoned-down conservative, a throwback to pre-Trump days. But those days are gone. His candidacy appears to be little more than an effort to distance himself from Donald Trump in the annals of history.

But the former VP is just the latest establishment Republican to effectively serve as a useful idiot for Democrats and the left. After Tucker Carlson opened the vault of unseen footage disrupting the insurrection narrative, widely-disliked Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell made a rare and gratuitous appearance before the cameras to say, “It was a mistake, in my view, [for] Fox News to depict this in a way completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official in the Capitol.” McConnell’s lecture was complete with a report from the Capitol Police serving as a prop he could hold high to advance the establishment’s singular, deliberately myopic narrative that the incursion into the US Capitol qualifies not just as a riot but an insurrection - in other words, a violent uprising designed to overthrow the government.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) - of course - and a handful of other GOP senators joined McConnell in decrying the “selective” use of footage by Fox. This is particularly galling and rich, given that House Democrats orchestrated a nationally televised, Hollywood-infused, Soviet-style show trial with only the cherry-picked footage they chose to support their insurrection narrative. Worse still, they enhanced the audio to make the crowd sound more violent.

Why do Republicans, unlike Democrats, insist on airing their dirty linen so publicly as to practically advertise their internal divisions? Do they not realize that wearing in-house quarrels on their sleeves weakens the party they claim to represent? The likes of Mike Pence will get nowhere with the massive chunk of the GOP base that still champions Trump and Trumpism. His own virtue-signaling only provides yet another talking point for the left. You can hear it now on CNN and MSNBC - even his own vice president believes Trump is unfit for office...

But as the GOP forms its circular firing squad, you might ask, what if Pence, McConnell and company believe deeply in how awful J6 really was? Well, career politicians of their ilk know precisely how to work inside the tent - without providing fodder for their adversaries on the left and in the media to effortlessly exploit. They can seek to control narratives, work issues with colleagues, or keep their own counsel on any matter in question - without providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Why was it necessary, not to mention advisable, for the Republican leader of the Senate and the former vice president to weigh in with statements that fully conform with the narrative pushed out by their opponents on the left?

The answer likely revolves not so much around whether Trump is right or wrong but whether he can win another general election. The sense one gets from inside the GOP tent is that the majority of professional Republicans, apart from whether they personally like or admire the 45th president, believe – without admitting it publicly - that he became unelectable on January 6, 2021. But with the new footage of the left’s insurrection poster child, the so-called QAnon Shaman, acting meekly as he traversed the Capitol and then directing his fellow insurgents to obey Trump’s orders and go home, the precious narrative built so meticulously by Democrats on a foundation of the most shocking footage available has begun to crumble under the weight of all the video evidence. And Trump is the big-time beneficiary, as he is now armed with the goods to defend himself against the left’s overreach in trying to depict a riot incited by dozens as an insurrection among thousands.

Meanwhile, it seems inevitable that Mr. Pence will look back on a failed campaign for president one of these days and say, I went after the most popular figure in the GOP, and all I got was not even a lousy t-shirt, but a lousy, sweeping rejection by the voters of my own party.