American Tragedy: Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and the Futility of Intentions

Mike Pence enabled Trump for four years. Joe Biden spent four years opposing Trumpism. Ultimately, only one of them was a bulwark against authoritarianism.

1. Huddled Masses

Starting Wednesday, Adrian Carrisquillo will be writing a twice-weekly newsletter for us called Huddled Masses covering Trump’s immigration policies. It’ll be a deeply reported product that separates optics from reality and focuses on what’s actually happening on the ground.

One of the ways The Bulwark can add value over the next four years is by contributing serious reporting and analysis on the most important subjects. Adrian’s Huddled Masses is the first of several new products we’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks.

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The coming year is full of dangers. We shouldn’t normalize this moment, but we also can’t be alarmist. We have to take the threats of Trumpism seriously, but we also must disentangle his lies from the reality of what his administration is doing.

And we need to do all of this without retreating into fake “objectivity” or bothsidesism.

We believe one of the answers is reported analysis that positions itself firmly on the side of liberal democracy.

I’m proud to have Adrian on the team and excited to learn from his work. Get ready for Huddled Masses, starting this Wednesday.

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Mike Pence and Joe Biden in the U.S. Capitol’s Old Senate Chamber on January 3, 2018. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

2. Biden and Pence

You won’t find a bigger admirer of Joe Biden anywhere outside his immediate family. I’ve written favorably about him over and over (and over).

And while Mike Pence might be a good father/brother/husband/friend, he was most definitely not my cup of chamomile. He spent four years propping up, bowing to, covering for, and enabling Donald Trump.

Joe Biden never had anything but the best intentions; Mike Pence’s intentions were rarely on the level.

And yet one of these men sacrificed his career to save democracy and the other made a series of choices which concluded with the restoration of Donald Trump and the complete takeover of the federal government by forces that are—at best—agnostic on the question of small-l liberalism.

It’s a story that could have been written by Euripides.

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It is important to remember that Mike Pence was in so deep that in October 2020 he was supporting the pre-election “Stop the Steal” narrative. At the vice presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Pence was asked about his running mate’s continual refusal to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Here is what Pence said:

When you talk about accepting the outcome of the election, I must tell you, senator, your party has spent the last three and a half years trying to overturn the results of the last election. It’s amazing. . . . If we have a free and fair election, we know—we’re going to have confidence in it.

This is a lie. Democrats did not spend any time trying to “overturn” the results of the 2016 election. No one tried to make Hillary Clinton president. At best, you could argue that the Democratic-led impeachment proceedings sought to remove Trump from office, but that would not have “overturned” the election. It would have made Mike Pence president.

After lying, Pence went on to play footsie with what would become the Big Lie. He should have simply said: “Yes, we’ll respect the results of the election.” Instead he added a qualifier—“if we have a free and fair election”—to make his acceptance conditional.

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By the numbers, Joe Biden was one of the most successful presidents of the modern era. He passed a silly amount of meaningful legislation, most of it with bipartisan support.¹ He fixed the COVID vaccine logistics mess created by Trump and shut the door on the pandemic. He capped insulin prices. He kept unemployment at or below 4 percent for nearly his entire term and whipped the post-COVID inflation of 2022. Oh, and he handled the first Great Power war in Europe since 1946 about as well as any American president has handled any foreign policy crisis in the post-WWII world.

Not to mention that he restored honor to the White House and civility to public life.

Look: Biden wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes, some of them major. But there is no such thing as a perfect presidential administration. Compare Biden’s term with the last 15 presidential terms, which takes us back to LBJ. Now rank these 15 terms by effectiveness and outcomes.² No matter what your political preferences are, Biden’s term has to be in the top half. For most reasonable observers it’s probably in the top five.

On top of all of this, Biden then did something extraordinary: When it was clear that he could not manage a vigorous campaign against Donald Trump, he stepped aside.

You can say that he should have done so sooner. Or that he never should have sought re-election. And either (or both) of those verdicts might be true. That doesn’t change the fact that he did seek re-election and that, upon discovering that this choice was unworkable, he did the right thing. The selfless thing.

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When history has its eye on you, it doesn’t judge by tallying up the balance sheets.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump sent an armed mob of thousands after his vice president. The explicit goal Trump set for them was to “take back” the country “with strength.” This meant disrupting the counting and certifying of Electoral College votes. This mob broke into the Capitol with the verbally declared purpose of hanging Mike Pence.

In that moment, Pence was the only man in America with the power to stop Trump’s coup.

If Pence had fled the Capitol, or declined to participate in the counting of the votes, it is unclear what might have happened. At the very least, the legally mandated process of ratifying the next president would have been derailed. Perhaps it would have been abandoned altogether.

But Pence didn’t leave. His Secret Service detail wanted to extract him from the Capitol, but Pence refused and was adamant about remaining onsite. He worked closely with the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate to speed Congress’s return to its task. Mike Pence didn’t just refuse to do what Trump demanded of him—he affirmatively worked with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to complete the process that would eject Trump from the presidency.

And he did all of this at a moment when his life and the lives of his family members were being threatened and he understood that his actions would end his career in politics.

There has never, in American history, been a more consequential vice president.

And Joe Biden? He governed skillfully and wisely. He had the best intentions. But in the end he will be seen as a transitional president—a man who merely occupied the interregnum between two authoritarian attempts.

Now maybe no president could have subdued Trumpism. I’m open to that possibility.³ But we don’t get to run the counterfactuals. We can only judge based on the results. And the result is that President Biden succeeded in nearly every aspect of job—except in the one that mattered most.

Mike Pence enabled authoritarianism. But succeeded in stopping Trump’s coup.

Joe Biden returned normalcy to political life and governed wisely. But he presided over the resurgence and total victory of the forces of Trumpism.

It’s a uniquely American tragedy.

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3. A.B.

Finally, some bittersweet news: A.B. Stoddard is stepping away from The Bulwark. Here’s a note from A.B.:

It is with the heaviest heart that I leave The Bulwark today. And it’s beyond surreal it is January 6th. This wasn’t intentional, it was just how this all unfurled.

Seasons in our lives, unlike the ones on the calendar, often arrive without warning but make themselves clear. Change comes, as it must. Whatever comes next will bring a shift in my focus and the rhythm of my days so I can be the best of myself for the people who matter the most.

Being a member of the Bulwark family is the honor of my life. I cannot describe the depth of my respect and admiration for my Bulwark colleagues. They are the best of us—brilliant, brave, kind, endearing and hilarious.

Thank you to everyone who has reached out to encourage me, and because this is such a unique place to work, to thank me. I become one of you today—a supporter of, and ambassador for, the vital work of The Bulwark. Stay true to the truth, it depends on all of us. —A.B.

Gut punch.

A.B. has become a dear friend over the years, so I’ll still get to commune with her on the regular. But I’ll miss having her work here at The Bulwark. I’m sure you will too.

1. The infrastructure bill; the Inflation Reduction Act; the CHIPS act; gun control reform; the Respect for Marriage Act; the reform of the Electoral Count Act; the Fiscal Responsibility Act; etc.

2. I’ll give it a try here:

1. Reagan 1

2. H.W. Bush

3. Clinton 1

4. Biden

5. Ford

6. Nixon 1

7. Obama 1

8. Obama 2

9. Clinton 2

10. Reagan 2

11. W. Bush 1

12. Carter

13. W. Bush 2

14. LBJ

15. Nixon 2

16. Trump 1

3. That argument would go something like: When 48 percent of the country wants something, there’s nothing the other 50 percent can do to stop them from getting it eventually. Nothing President Biden could have done would have leached the toxins out of the Republican party or changed the desires of Republican voters. And Biden could not have crushed the MAGA movement through an aggressive, confrontational approach.

I’m not sure I believe—but that would be the argument.

For instance: Had Biden appointed an attorney general intent on immediately holding Trump accountable for his crimes, maybe that leads to a different outcome. Had Biden intervened in the second impeachment, maybe he could have brought enough Republican senators along to get a conviction.