“First, we’ll kill all the lawyers,” Cado’s rebel henchman, anarchist Dick the Butcher, says in Shakespeare’s “King Henry VI,” in Part 2, Act 4.
Anarchist rebel Donald Trump doesn’t kill lawyers, but he doesn’t pay them, and throws them under the bus. His henchman, Mike Pence, doesn’t propose killing them, either; he just shifts blame to them.
I assume the reason the Trump inner circle doesn’t want to kill lawyers is because they desperately need them; they’re in a lot of trouble.
When Pence went on Meet the Press on Sunday, November 20, 2022, the show’s host, Chuck Todd, asked him if he thought Trump “committed a criminal act in fomenting the insurrection?” This is so simple a grade schooler could answer it, but Pence fumbled it. Here’s what he said:
“Well, I don’t know if it is criminal to listen to bad advice from lawyers. Truth is, what the president was repeating was what he was hearing from that gaggle of attorneys around. And you know, presidents, just like all of us that have served in public life, you have to rely on your team.”
(Read story here.) Where to begin? The obvious place: Politicians dodge, we’re used to that, but this slither makes your coils hurt. And Pence, who’s a lawyer, knows better.
First, let’s start with him. As far as we know, Pence never gave Trump proper advice, legal or otherwise. It would go like this: “You lost the election, and need to cooperate with in a peaceful transfer of power, as all other presidents have done.” If Pence believed Trump was getting bad advice from lawyers like Rudy Guiliani and John Eastman, the architect of the fake electors scheme now under criminal investigation, why didn’t he warn his boss not to listen to those lawyers?
Second, it’s not credible that any lawyer would advise Trump to incite a riot at the Capitol. No lawyer in his or her right mind would encourage a client to commit a crime. Lawyers, of all people, know people go to prison for that, and any lawyer who gave such advice would be disbarred. The uprising was Trump’s idea.
Third, Pence’s premise is that Trump listens to other people, takes advice, and his “team” tells him what to do. Are you kidding me? Who’s going to believe that? And do you think Trump’s followers would stick with him if he let lawyers tell him what to do? They hate lawyers.
Fourth, if Trump can’t figure out for himself that trying to violently overthrow an election result is wrong, illegal, and immoral, he shouldn’t be a candidate. And if his lawyers told him that’s okay, they shouldn’t be lawyers. (There may be some followup on this latter point by bar associations; for example, Eastman is already under investigation by the California bar, and Giuliani has been suspended by New York and Washington D.C.)
Basically, Pence is telling us that Republicans won’t take responsibility for their decisions and actions; if they do something bad, it’s someone else’s fault. I don’t vote for people like that. Do you?