Despite the former president saying that his former vice president, Mike Pence, “deserved to be hanged” over his refusal to overturn the 2020 election, Pence has continued to come to Donald Trump’s defense in light of the House Select Committee’s criminal referral.
“I would hope that they would not bring charges against the former president,” Pence said in a recent Fox News interview. “I think the president’s actions and words on January 6 were reckless, but I don’t know that it’s criminal to take bad advice from lawyers.”
Leading a “Morning Joe” panel on the matter Thursday morning on MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough emphasized that he thinks Pence is making a mistake.
“For such a long part of Donald Trump’s administration he just, he shamed himself, he humiliated himself,” Scarborough said. “And on January 6, I was so proud of him, standing up for American democracy. I was like, OK, all’s well that ends well. And now we have him back in the old role of really humiliating himself and lying for Donald Trump.”
Pulling up an interview with former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who claims that he was against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and that he only wanted an “orderly transition,” Scarborough explained that according to previous reports, not one person agreed with what the former president was doing.
“And yet here we have Mike Pence trying to blame the lawyers,” he lamented. “We heard the lawyers all against this horrible plan, all desperate to get Donald Trump to call the insurrectionists and the mobsters off when Mike Pence’s life was in danger. And all despaired when he refused to do it. All of them. Every single one.”
“It just comes down to the fact that he doesn’t understand – it’s like a political version of ‘The Sixth Sense.’ He doesn’t know politically that he’s dead,” Scarborough said of Pence. “He’s not gonna win anything, he’s never gonna be elected to office again. Donald Trump will make sure of that. There are enough Trumpists in the base, they’ll never forgive him for that.”
Scarborough then advised the former VP to take a note out of Liz Cheney’s book.
“If you’re not going to get elected for doing the right thing, do what Liz Cheney did… Liz made a decision. She knew she could do the right thing, or she could get reelected. So Liz has lived politically to fight another day. We don’t know when that’s going to be, but that’s a decision that Mike Pence needs to make right now,” he said. “We don’t know what the political landscape is going to look like in two years, in five years, in 10 years. Mike Pence could still have a future there, but he’s trying to get elected in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It’s never going to happen.”
The host added that Pence “just doesn’t seem to understand he’s not going to be president in Donald Trump’s party, so again, why not keep doing the right thing like he did before and like he did on January 6?”
“Mike Pence got January 6 right. He needs to make that his legacy.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” panel discussion in the video above.
