Tag: Mike Pence

Minnesota Leaders Call Out Trump’s COVID-19 Failures as Pence Visited Duluth

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA – Ahead of Vice President Pence’s visit to Duluth, Minnesota Friday, DFL Party leaders held a press call slamming the Trump admin’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic, his divisive rhetoric, and the harmful impacts of his policies on Minnesotans. Featured on the call were DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin, General President of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers Joseph Sellers, Duluth Mayor Emily Larson, North East Area Labor Council President Alan Netland, nurse Chris Rubesch, and Duluth resident Beth McCuskey. 

Excerpts from the call:

Joseph Sellers, General President of Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers: “[The Trump administration] doesn’t feel the way we do. They can’t understand it. They can’t relate to the issues that we experience as working families. Joe Biden does. We at SMART call Vice President Biden, ‘Blue Collar Biden,’ why? Because he does. He understands workers. He understands working issues. He understands working family issues, and he can relate to us. Our country is not a company where the mantra is, ‘You’re fired, and you’re fired and you’re fired.’ This administration’s cavalier attitude has collapsed our economy for the 22nd time, more than a million unemployment insurance claims were filed. This administration is disconnected from the pain and the suffering of workers.”

Continue reading “Minnesota Leaders Call Out Trump’s COVID-19 Failures as Pence Visited Duluth”

RNC vs. DNC Ratings: Kamala Harris Draws 5.7 Million More Viewers Than Mike Pence

Someone start playing the Rocky theme music because the DNC’s ratings might have just delivered the knockout punch to the RNC score. Viewership for the Republican National Convention fell on its third night, in sharp contrast to the gains the DNC saw last week for Night 3. 

According to early Nielsen numbers, about 15.7 million viewers watched the Republican National Convention during the 10 p.m. hour across six networks: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS. That’s down about 2.3 million viewers from the previous night, which featured a speech from First Lady Melania Trump. By comparison, the Democratic National Convention pulled 21.4 million viewers across those same six networks on Night 3, which was up 2.2 million from its previous night’s viewership numbers.

The RNC’s big Night 3 speaker was President Donald Trump‘s running mate and Vice President Mike Pence. Pence spoke about the administration’s support of the families in the path of hurricane Laura and its dedication to the American armed forces and veterans, and he praised Trump’s response to the outbreak of COVID-19. Continue reading.

Fact-checking Mike Pence, night 3 of the 2020 RNC

In accepting the Republican Party nomination on Aug. 27, Vice President Mike Pence accurately recounted the history of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, and how a failed British bombardment in 1814 helped inspire Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  

Pence’s attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, on the other hand, were sometimes misleading, incomplete or wrong. 

“Joe Biden wants to end school choice.”  

This is Mostly False. (Trump made the same claim in July.) Continue reading.

How Mike Pence slowed down the coronavirus response

Taking the reins in late February, the vice president sought to bring order to a chaotic response. He also slowed things down.

Mike Pence had just accepted the biggest assignment of his political life, overseeing the nation’s response to the emerging Covid-19 virus, when White House officials confronted the vice president with an urgent question: what to do about the cruise ships?

It was the last weekend of February, and the nation’s top health officials had concluded that cruise lines were a major factor in spreading the virus — each vessel a potential hothouse of invisible infections. Hundreds of passengers already had been sickened on cruises; efforts to evacuate Americans from two virus-infested ships had become logistical nightmares; and in the health experts’ emerging consensus, the Centers for Disease Control needed to issue an immediate “no-sail” order, keeping ships in port.

The looming decision would test the vice president, pulled off the campaign trail and tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the coronavirus task force in a major shake-up of the U.S. response. “Mike is going to be in charge, and Mike will report back to me,” Trump said on Feb. 26 — before a single reported Covid-19 fatality in the United States. “He’s got a certain talent for this.” Continue reading.

Mike Pence hopes four years of subservience to Trump will lift his political future

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Like many who served in Congress alongside the late John Lewis, then-Rep. Mike Pence made a pilgrimage to Selma, Ala., in 2010 to commemorate the 45th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” He marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge just a few feet from Lewis as they retraced the historic route, and posed for a photo at the foot of the span — the Indiana Republican in crisp gray and the Georgia Democrat in somber black, their shoulders touching.

But when Lewis died last month of pancreatic cancer at 80, Pence, now vice president, held off on issuing a public comment on the civil rights hero’s passing. President Trump was no fan of the congressman and openly complained about Lewis’s refusal to attend his inauguration. Only after the White House distributed a perfunctory proclamation on the death in Trump’s name did Pence feel comfortable releasing a statement of his own, memorializing Lewis as not just an “icon” but also “a colleague and a friend.”

That hesitation — deferring to Trump for cues, and then following his lead — was classic Pence. It exemplified the well-honed subservience of a man who once governed his home state of Indiana but who as vice president has transformed himself into a loyal student and servant of Trump — binding his political ambitions to a mercurial and capricious boss now trailing in polls with just over two months to go until Election Day. Continue reading.

Pence brags of jobs he and Trump ‘created’ as unemployment remains at 10%

Analysts say those ‘new’ jobs are mostly from people returning to jobs they lost during the lockdown.

Mike Pence claimed on Wednesday that he and Donald Trump had created more jobs during the coronavirus pandemic than the previous administration created during its entire tenure. In reality, some of the businesses that temporarily closed during the pandemic have reopened, bringing back some of the jobs that lost during the historic unemployment that is still decimating the U.S. economy.

On Fox News, Pence bragged that he and Trump had “made this country stronger, more prosperous in our first three years” and that Trump “has seen us through the worst pandemic in a hundred years.”

“We’ve already created more jobs in the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their eight years in office. I’m excited to tell the story,” Pence said. Continue reading.

How Kristi Noem, Mount Rushmore and Trump Fueled Speculation About Pence’s Job

WASHINGTON — Since the first days after she was elected governor of South Dakota in 2018, Kristi Noem had been working to ensure that President Donald Trump would come to Mount Rushmore for a fireworks-filled July Fourth extravaganza.

After all, the president had told her in the Oval Office that he aspired to have his image etched on the monument. And last year, a White House aide reached out to the governor’s office with a question, according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation: What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?

So last month, when the president arrived in the Black Hills for the star-spangled spectacle he had pined for, Noem made the most of it. Continue reading.

On The Trail: Pence’s knives come out

The Hill logoVice President Pence has spent three decades in public life selling his brand of orthodox Republicanism through calm and reserved gentility. He is conservative, he likes to say, but he is not angry about it.

But Pence, who once wrote an essay forswearing negative campaign tactics, has always harbored a sharper edge, an attack dog who only occasionally bares his fangs. And as polls show Pence’s boss trailing, the vice president has increasingly snapped at critics and even some erstwhile allies.

This past week, Pence lashed out at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), one of the harshest critics of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. In an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News, Pence blamed Cuomo for some of the 32,000 New Yorkers who have died from COVID-19. Continue reading.

Pence’s hyped-up claims of ‘voter fraud’ in Indiana

Washington Post logo“Make no mistake about it. The reality of voter fraud is undeniable. We’ve seen case after case around the country where there have been prosecutions. … In my own state of Indiana in 2012, there was a Democrat super PAC that was involved in our elections, that literally, there was a group of people that were prosecuted for falsifying ballots. This happens, Martha.”

— Vice President Pence, remarks during an interview on “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” July 28

Everyone sometimes mixes up dates, and Pence did not get the year right. In 2012, the most noteworthy voter fraud case in Indiana involved a Republican — when former secretary of state Charlie White was convicted of six Class D felony charges, including voter fraud, perjury and theft. “Prosecutors said he voted and took pay as a Fishers Town Council member of a district in which he no longer lived,” the Indianapolis Star reported.

Pence actually meant to say 2016. We have noted before that there are relatively few cases of voter fraud, not “case after case.” But for the purposes of this fact check, is Pence correct when he claims that people associated with a Democratic super PAC were prosecuted for “voter fraud” and “falsifying ballots”? Continue reading.

Mike Pence’s office pressured Navy to reinstate controversial former Missouri governor: FOIA’d documents

AlterNet logoIn June 2018, Republican Eric Greitens — who had been battling criminal charges — resigned from his position as governor of Missouri. Greitens served as Navy SEAL before pursuing a career in politics, and according to the Kansas City Star, Vice President Mike Pence tried to pressure the U.S. Navy into reinstating the former Missouri governor in 2019. But Pence’s office, according to the Associated Press, has flatly denied that the vice president intervened in the matter.

Star reporters Tara Copp, Jason Hancock and Bryan Lowry explain that according to documents the publication has obtained, “Greitens had been charged with a felony in 2018 connected to allegations of violent sexual misconduct. Though the charge was ultimately dropped, the Navy wasn’t ready to welcome the former governor back at a time when the military was facing intense criticism over its response to sexual assault in its ranks. It was after the intervention of Vice President Mike Pence’s office that Greitens was allowed to return as a reservist, the documents show.”

In an e-mail dated May 24, 2019, the Star reporters note, Navy Vice Adm. Robert Burke wrote, “Since he was in the (individual ready reserve) at the time, we had no recourse. If he were in the AC (active component), or even RC (reserve component) on active duty, we would have gone after Art 120 (Article 120 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, rape and sexual assault). But for a reservist not on orders, or the IRR, we have no authority; it’s like holding a civilian accountable. How could/should that have been accounted for in the administrative move from IRR to [selected reserve)?” Continue reading.