Pence gives bombshell speech that Trump was ‘wrong.’ But now comes the hard part | Editorial

Former Vice President Mike Pence finally, finally, finally said what needed to be said.

“President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”

Well, hallelujah.

Sort of.

It’s a year late, and it’s not under oath. But he said it — and to a Florida gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. It was a full-on rebuke of Donald Trump’s wrongful insistence that he, as vice president, could have changed the outcome of the November election.

“The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone,” he continued. “And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

That’s such a basic idea. In a democracy, the presidency belongs to the people, not any one president or political party or faction. A truthful statement like that shouldn’t feel like a bomb has gone off in the room.

But it does. And that’s because the gas-lighting has been going on for so long now.

The Big Lie won’t die

It’s still happening. Trump has been amping up his false claims in recent days, saying he’d consider pardoning those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 if he wins the presidency again. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected the idea that the deadly assault was an “insurrection” and said the commemoration a year later was like “Christmas” for news outlets. The Republican National Committee on Friday censured the two Republicans who took part in a House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack, at first saying they had participated in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” but then rushing to amend that statement to say they didn’t mean that to apply to the rioters.

The rioters who carried Trump flags, broke into the Capitol, terrorized police and chanted “Hang Pence”? Those rioters?

We don’t want to go overboard and give Pence too much credit. His words were long overdue and, in that intervening year, the harm to the republic he professes to love was incalculable. Members of his own party are showing all the signs that they want to forgive the rioters and forget the events of that day.

If Pence truly wants to remedy any of the damage to this country, he should now encourage other Republicans to drop the masks of falsity so many have willingly worn for a year, too fearful of Trump to stop mouthing his Big Lie.

For Pence, it might turn out that his speech was the easy part.

But today, in this one moment, hearing a top Republican say the plain and simple truth gives us a flicker of relief, a momentary cessation of pain, like a national headache that suddenly stops hurting. Even if it’s just for a moment, even if it’s just so Pence can set up his own run for the presidency. We’ll take it.

Now, how many Republicans are listening?