Mike Pence is back.
The former Vice President took the last 100 days off, after his secret but lavish taxpayer-funded Vail vacation in December, and now he’s back laying the groundwork to run for president by tying himself to Trump (whether the former president likes it or not) and promising to fight “the Biden administration’s whole-hearted embrace of the radical left’s all-encompassing, rapidly-escalating war on American traditional values.”
Pence chose as his first post-White House venue a Southern religious right organization tied to an anti-LGBTQ hate group called Palmetto Family.
It did not go well.
“As Pence spoke, no cable channel picked up his remarks. Just a few dozen people at any given time watched him live on Facebook, including roughly 55 when the speech ended,” Politico reports in a piece titled, “Mike Pence reemerges. But Trumpworld is moving on.”
The speech was carried live on C-SPAN, which included a 2024 logo in the chyron, just in case there was any question about why Pence was speaking.
His speech was filled with bad jokes, praise for Trump which Pence magnificently managed to twist into praise for himself, and false claims including that they “made America greater than ever before.”
And these:
“In just 100 days,” Pence also claimed, “the Biden-Harris administration has launched an avalanche of liberal policies that threaten to derail all the progress that we made.”
Pence promised in the future he will continue to protect religious liberty and gun rights, because that’s “the winning agenda,” he told supporters.
“It’s incumbent upon us to take that winning agenda to the American people,” he added, positioning himself as being given a mandate to run for president without actually saying it.
But there was so little interest in Pence’s speech he (or his team) had to tweet out the videos of him speaking, and many of the people tweeting about his speech were members of the press.
He also tweeted out snippets from his speech, like these: