Throughout their ongoing explosive televised hearings, the January 6th House Select Committee has highlighted the tense feud between ex-President Donald Trump and his former Vice President Mike Pence. The beef hails from Pence’s refusal to go along with Donald Trump’s attempted coup after he essentially demanded that his VIP refuse to allow the certification of the January 6th Electoral College votes that would make Joe Biden’s election win official. Pence’s defiance resulted in the then-president’s rabid supporters setting their sights on Trump’s right-hand man, going so far as to openly call for Pence’s hanging — an ordeal that, according to witnesses and insiders, Trump was apparently somewhat supportive of at the time.
However, according to surprising new reporting from the Washington Post, there was more to the situation between Trump and Pence, on the heels of January 6th and Donald’s departure from the White House, than what originally meets the eye. The publication now reports that the humiliated, disgraced former guy actually sent multiple invitations to his former vice president to visit him at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort that he called home after his White House departure — but Pence likely personally added to Donald’s humiliation and shattered ego when he brutally snubbed every one of them.
“Pence has not spoken to Trump in more than a year and rebuffed initial invitations to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, advisers said,” WaPo reports. “A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.”
Pence has reportedly hinted around among his insiders that he may lodge a bid for the Republican presidential nomination against his old boss, though polling has consistently showed him trailing behind not only Donald Trump but also Florida’s ultra-right-wing governor, Ron DeSantis. The former VP has also reportedly told his donors that he supported Donald Trump, but did not agree with Trump’s claims that Pence possessed the legal power to stop Joe Biden’s election win.
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South Carolina state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, who has personally organized several Pence appearances in his state, said, “He’s been asked in a few places here and there what his take is on it, and he generally just said, ‘The vice president has a ceremonial role there. I had no constitutional authority to do that.’ We’ve been at eight events together, and of the eight events we’ve been at, it’s maybe come up four times. It hasn’t been a dominant topic.”
Inside advisors have noticed that while Donald Trump clearly isn’t happy with his old running mate, he hasn’t lodged the same level of brutal attacks against Pence as we’ve seen against former Attorney General William Barr or former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, while Pence continues to boast a shared agenda with his old boss.
GOP operative Tim Phillips said, “Mike Pence clearly delineates between being proud of the policies he helped deliver for those four years, and he sees that as separate from what he was asked and pressured to do post-election. He is proud of the policies he helped implement and he’s proud of what he did in that period after the election. He separates those things.”
Read the full report from the Washington Post here.
Featured image via screen capture
