The former VP doesn’t have much of any value to say.
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Managing Editor
Mike Pence has always had a strange personality, and that doesn’t exclusively revolve around his religious nature. He is just deeply weird, and has extremely warped views that have been on display dating back to his 1990’s regional radio show.
In “So Help Me God” Pence doesn’t tell the reader anything that they don’t already know within the book’s near 450 page length, aside from some personal anecdotes. No one cares about that. The real meat of the interest surrounding the memoir concerns his politics, and specifically his Vice Presidency under Donald Trump.
The beginnings of his political career and through the end of his tenure as the governor of Indiana are admittedly interesting. It’s not as if Pence was politically unqualified to hold the offices that he held. But arguably, not too many people may have been aware of Pence before Trump picked him as his running mate, so at the very least, the reader gets to have an understanding of the man and form an opinion on why Trump chose him.
But it’s after Pence’s Vice Presidency where the book becomes his own personal coping mechanism, an attempt to reframe certain events in a better light, especially when it comes to the perception of the words and actions of his boss. While he openly and substantially criticizes Trump, he also stops short of fully condemning his behavior. He leaves large portions of information that doesn’t make him look good out of his narrative. Perhaps he thinks that’s better than lying.
To his credit, he doesn’t let Donald Trump off the hook for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, but he also doesn’t go nearly far enough to condemn him. Pence’s account of the Jan. 6 insurrection feels very sanitized and detached from the actual danger of the incident. The incident, and Pence’s reaction to it, is a part of the literal promotion for “So Help Me God” on the book’s back cover, but while Pence gives his personal perspective of what went down, there is no new information, just a different take on regurgitated information instead.
“So Help Me God” will appeal to the less extreme parts of the Republican base, who may see it as some sort of victory lap for a Vice President put in an impossible position. But for most others, it’s just a complete waste of time.
