Now, Trump’s valet wants to be president. Pence hasn’t announced his candidacy yet — that would be too assertive, too direct, too scrutable. Instead, he’s tracking the presidential campaign scent with visits to Iowa and New Hampshire, and his staff is complaining about the good press Nikki Haley’s campaign is getting. If he really covets more press, let’s give it to him.

And if he really wants to be president, let’s learn a little more about when he was one heartbeat from that office, and the ways he assisted and accommodated Trump.

Yet Pence won’t even cooperate smoothly with the special counsel seeking to investigate the effort to overturn the 2020 election; he’s forcing a judge to compel his testimony.

For the past 15 months, Pence has acted as if bound by some non-disparagement agreement from speaking his mind about the Trump presidency. In the interim, Trump has continued to blast Pence. In January 2022, he excoriated Pence for not overturning the election. In June 2022, he ripped Pence for not having “the courage to act.” In November 2022, when ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked Trump about the “Hang Mike Pence” chant, Trump defended the vitriol, saying, “It’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect.” As recently as three weeks ago, Trump was still targeting Pence, telling reporters, “In many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6.”

Pence has every right to get a little hot at being painted as a traitor who might be worthy of execution and is even at fault for the events that could have killed him.

So how has he answered Trump? With the grandest turn-the-other cheek mewling you have ever heard. In June 2021, Pence called Jan. 6 a “dark day,” but didn’t elaborate beyond saying the riot was quelled. Speaking on Fox News in October 2021, Pence called continuing media coverage of Jan. 6 a way to “distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda.” In May 2022, Pence acknowledged that Trump was “wrong” for saying he could block ratification of the election but was mute on Trump endangering him. By November 2022, he was ready to call Trump “reckless” and to say he was “angry” after the riot, but is silent about who he was angry with.

In mid-March of this year, Pence seemed ready to give Trump a dressing down, saying, “History will hold Donald Trump accountable” at the Gridiron Dinner. But a couple of weeks later, he was as docile as a sloth when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer gave Pence a free shot at Trump. Blitzer asked whether he was “comfortable” with a recording of Jan. 6 prisoners singing the National Anthem at a Trump rally. Pence agreed that the perps belonged in jail but shared no harsh words about Trump, even saying the Trump prosecution in Manhattan over a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was an “outrage.”

For Pence, the fact that the president supported a violent crowd against his own vice president is a personal thing, not an issue that rises to the political. In a November 2022 interview with ABC News’ David Muir, Pence says Trump never apologized, but five days after the riots did express a sentiment that Pence interpreted as an apology. What a pushover.

In writing his memoir, So Help Me God, published almost two years after the riots, Pence could have dipped into his four-plus year-long dossier on Trump and given readers an honest look at the administration. But he balked. Instead, he still called Trump his “friend.” With friends like that … Pence wants you to believe that Trump is a good man, that his cause was just. Pence does, however, criticize Trump’s response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, he does acknowledge a degree of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and he calls Trump’s conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as something less than the “perfect” call Trump made it out to be.

But he never lifts the screen of loyalty he extended in 2016 to protect and defend Trump against all comers. “Pence surely has thoughts on Trump beyond the book’s carefully crafted, made-for-promotional-material talking points, but he won’t give them to us,” Tim Alberta writes in his insightful Atlantic review of the memoir.

Even now, months after the book’s release, Pence avoids discussing his agreements and disagreements with Trump, tossing this line to Bret Baier recently: “I have debated Donald Trump before,” he said. “Just not with the cameras on.”

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who knows from experience how associating with Trump can blur one’s ethical vision, sees through the Pence pose. Speaking on ABC News’ This Week on Sunday, he unloaded on Pence’s speak-no-evil cowardice. “I was very disappointed ... when [Pence] was asked about Trump saying that it’s OK to suspend the Constitution if you feel like an election’s being stolen, and whether that’s disqualifying. And Mike said, that’s up to the American people,” Christie said. “If you’re offering yourself for high public office, you have an obligation to tell people if someone is knowingly advocating for violating their oath.”

For Pence, the political is the personal, something to be tucked away like a breakable family heirloom in a bottom drawer. Dark days seem just to happen and aren’t caused by anybody. Perhaps that’s because to trace any of the madness of that day back to its roots would require him to confess that he stood totem pole still while Trump raved on — or worse, that he was Trump’s willing co-conspirator until Jan. 6 when he actually did the right thing.

This being politics, Pence wouldn’t need to dump Trump into some fiery hole to prove that he’s his own man. Neither does he have to walk a tightrope, ever-worrying that he might say something that would offend Trump or his acolytes. There’s no escaping the fact that any 2024 Republican presidential candidacy other than Trump’s is an anti-Trump move, so if he’s going to run he has to accept that he’s turned against Trump. If it’s Pence’s view that Trump is not that bad, then why not just endorse him instead of running against him?

Pence’s passivity, which ignited the day he signed on as Trump’s running mate and ran full bore until the end of Trump administration, got another boost when the pair left office. As he gathers kindling for his own presidential run, Pence remains tethered to the Trump leash politically, unable to speak his own mind, moving toward 2024 with all the groveling and purpose you might expect from a sloth.

******

Unfair to sloths, I know. Send your animal crackers to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed doesn’t believe in political hangings. My Mastodon account is a haunted house. My Post account couldn’t get arrested if it walked naked through the Rotunda. My RSS feed will never write a memoir. Or a novel. Or a cookbook. Or a children’s book.