Mike Pence: Trump is “Part of the Problem,” January 6 Behavior Was “Reckless”

Former Vice President Mike Pence called then-President Donald Trump “reckless” with his response to the January 6 riot, saying Trump “endangered me and my family and everyone at the Capitol building.”

Pence’s comments came during an interview Sunday night with ABC’s David Muir, just two days before Trump is expected to announce his 2024 bid for president.

Trump had been incensed at Pence, who oversaw Congress’s certification of Electoral College results, for not going along with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. While Pence and other officials were barricaded inside the Capitol on January 6, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should’ve been done.”

On the tweet, Pence said: “It angered me, but I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and I said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law.’”

Pence’s comments are part of a longer series of attempts to both express his disapproval for Trump yet still maintain favor with the party.

Last week, Pence penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal recounting the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election. In it, he described his repeated attempts to follow constitutional order in not overturning election results, and yet still in a charming conclusion he tells Trump, “I’m also never gonna stop praying for you.”

And Trump, Pence writes, smiles right back, saying “That’s right—don’t ever change.”

The heartwarming moment came after Trump leveled threats toward Pence and incited a riot of insurrectionists who sought to hang the former vice president.

Pence’s piece came from his forthcoming memoir, set to be released on Tuesday. In the memoir, Pence also attacks Trump on his handling of the 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, the investigations into Russian election interference, and both instances when Trump faced impeachment.

Also on Tuesday, Trump is expected to announce his third consecutive bid for the presidency.

Trump will likely continue with his announcement, in spite—or perhaps especially because—of Pence’s press tour and a broader party establishment raring to get rid of the former president after a disappointing midterm showing.

Though Trump-endorsed candidates fared poorly in the midterms, he still commands popularity among a broad swath of the Republican electorate. With Pence’s comments coming on the brink of Trump’s announcement—while Ron DeSantis enjoys large favor with the party establishment—the race for 2024 has officially begun.

Control of the House of Representatives was still up for grabs Monday, although the Democrats’ path to victory has narrowed significantly.

The New York Times showed Democrats holding 204 seats, while the Republicans had 212. A party needs 218 seats for a majority. There are still 19 uncalled races.

The Senate stayed in Democratic control after Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto won their races in Arizona and Nevada, respectively, over the weekend. With 50 Democratic senators, Vice President Kamala Harris can be the tie-breaking vote. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker will face off for the Georgia senator position in a December runoff.

Christopher Bouzy, the founder of anti-hate research organization Bot Sentinel, said he was “confident” the Democrats could get to 216 seats as more races in California, Arkansas, Maine, and Oregon are called.

He explained on Twitter he was optimistic that Democrats could also win in a few other tight races, including against Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, and secure the needed 218 seats.

Bouzy also noted that Democrats have already pulled off a major upset, after analysts predicted for weeks there would be a “red wave” that saw Republicans take back both houses of Congress.

Instead, Democrats kept control of the Senate, and the House races are coming down to the wire.

If Democrats don’t win the needed remaining races, Republicans will have a slim majority of just a few seats.

The left was able to win by running on both “pocketbook” and social issues, galvanizing a record voter turnout—particularly among women and young people—that saw the red wave dry up to a trickle.

President Biden, who had warned repeatedly that “democracy is on the ballot” during the midterm elections, also hailed the wins.

“We lost fewer seats in the House of Representatives than any Democratic president’s first midterm election in at least 40 years. And we had the best midterms for Governors since 1986,” he tweeted after Election Day.

“The American people spoke.”

However, he expressed concerns it wouldn’t be enough. “I think we’re going to get very close in the House. I think it’s going to be very close, but I don’t think we’re going to make it,” he told reporters Monday on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Indonesia.

Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto was reelected Nevada senator on Tuesday in a tight race against MAGA Republican Adam Laxalt, according to a projection from NBC News.

Cortez Masto leads Laxalt 48.7 percent to 48.2 percent, with 96 percent reporting.

With Cortez Masto’s victory in Nevada, Democrats will have 50 seats and maintain control in the Senate, as Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote.

Nevada is a swing state that went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and Joe Biden in 2020. But analysts have been warning for weeks that Democrats have taken the state’s Latino vote for granted and risked losing the crucial demographic during the midterms.

Cortez Masto, who in 2016 became the first Latina elected to Senate, specifically targeted Latina voters during her campaign. She focused on issues such as abortion access, affordable housing, and childcare.

She also sought to reach out to Latino small-business owners, to ensure they did not feel forgotten by Washington lawmakers.

Laxalt, however, was confident that he could draw the Latino vote away from the Democrats.

A descendant of Washington institution Republicans—his grandfather was once called Ronald Reagan’s “first friend”—Laxalt has veered sharply right from his family tree.

A former Nevada attorney general, Laxalt co-chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in the state and is now positioned to take up the former president’s ideological mantle.

He has complained against “wokeness” and pushed multiple conspiracy theories, including the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. After announcing his Senate campaign in late 2021, Laxalt pushed for an audit of the 2020 results in Douglas County, a rural county in Nevada’s northwest.

In October, 14 of his relatives endorsed Cortez Masto, though Laxalt pointed out that most of them were already registered Democrats.

This article has been updated.

Mega-conspiracy theorist and MAGA Republican Mark Finchem lost the race for Arizona secretary of state, according to a projection from the Associated Press.

Democratic Adrian Fontes leads Finchem 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent, with 83 percent of votes counted. The former Maricopa County recorder and U.S. Marine will control the certification of election results in a crucial swing state.

Finchem ran an unusual campaign, with almost no paid advertising, public events, or media appearances, and with only one aide. Instead, he opted to ride the popularity of other more prominent right-wingers such as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The Republican, whose signature look includes a cowboy hat, campaigned under the slogan “Just Follow the Law”—but he seemed pretty intent on breaking it.

A 2020 election denier, Finchem was photographed in the mob outside the Capitol on January 6. He has denied going into the building but says he would not have certified the results that year and has hinted he might reject Democratic victories in the future. He had expressed deep distrust of vote-counting machines and could force counties to count the votes by hand, which experts say is slower and less accurate. He can also change rules on where to set up voting booths and work with the state government to restrict early and mail-in voting.

Finchem also expressed support for the groups of people who showed up, sometimes armed, at early voting stations in Arizona. They said they were watching for voter fraud, but many accused them of voter intimidation, as they would take photos of people dropping off their ballots and sometimes follow voters.

As if that weren’t dangerous enough, Finchem has embraced some conspiracy theories that even his fellow MAGA Republicans won’t touch. He has said he is a member of the Oath Keepers and has accused former Vice President Mike Pence of plotting both a coup to topple Trump and to steal the presidency in 2024.

Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly has defeated Republican challenger Blake Masters in the hotly contested Arizona Senate race. The race was called late Friday night by the Associated Press; with 83 percent of votes in, Kelly was leading by a margin of 51.8 to 46.1 percent. At the time the race was called, Masters was running slightly behind his fellow Republican, Kari Lake, who is running for governor in the state. (When the Senate race was called, Lake trailed Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs by a 50.7 t0 49.3 margin.)  

Arizona was seen as one of the races crucial to Democrats maintaining their hair-thin hold on the Senate. By securing re-election, Kelly brings the Democrats within one seat of keeping control of the Senate (should Democrats notch 50 seats, Vice President Kamala Harris will cast the tie-breaking vote). 

Kelly, a former astronaut and husband of former Representative Gabby Giffords, supports codifying abortion access into law and overhauling the U.S. immigration system. He also backs increased gun regulation and runs a nonprofit dedicated to the issue with his wife, who retired from politics after surviving an assassination attempt.

Arizona went for President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election, in a major upset.

But Republicans made steady inroads over the following two years, in part due to runaway inflation that they blamed on Biden.

Masters was seen as a long-shot candidate, but he gained steadily on Kelly in the last few weeks of the race. He was endorsed by former President Donald Trump and got a huge popularity boost through support from a MAGA PAC and his former boss, far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, who was a major donor to Masters’ campaign.

Masters initially supported a fetal personhood law but soon backed off that extreme stance in favor of a federal 15-week abortion ban. Both his initial abortion stance and his (false) claims that the 2020 election was rigged were scrubbed from his campaign website. He also supports finishing the expensive and ineffective U.S.-Mexico border wall started by Trump.

Attention now shifts to the Nevada Senate race, where Republican Adam Laxalt, at the time of this writing, had a 821 vote lead over incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. However, Nevada politics reporter John Ralston, who has forgotten more about the Silver State’s political scene than most of the rest of us will ever know, favors Cortez Masto based on where the remaining votes are. 

 Should Democrats manage to secure the Senate ahead of the Georgia run-off, it could scramble the conventional wisdom of how voters might turn out to vote in that contest. The New Republic’s Grace Segers has some timely analysis of how that contest might shake out should Democrats win in Nevada.