It’s been more than three years since supporters of Donald Trump chanted for the death of Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States at the time, but it feels like yesterday.
Few people were as affected that day as much as Pence. Once the right-hand man of MAGA’s messiah, he became public enemy number one after refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He’s since been ejected — unwillingly, it seems — from the MAGA movement, but that doesn’t mean Pence has backed off of politics for good.
What happened to Mike Pence?
Following the Jan. 6 insurrection and Mike Pence’s messy ouster from the Trump camp, the former VP continued to voice his support for Trump. He waxed poetic about the man whose supporters called for his hanging, and took his affiliation with Trump straight to the bank.
Pence’s experience, paired with his ties to the MAGA movement, earned him a position with the Heritage Foundation, the Young America’s Foundation, a gig doing voiceover work, and even a few book deals. He kept busy with his many pseudo-political pursuits through 2021 and 2022, and spent a large chunk of 2023 initially fighting, and later adhering to, a subpoena related the events of Jan. 6.
He even made a brief bid for the presidency in 2023, but it floundered in the wake of Trump’s unshakeable popularity. He withdrew before 2024 had even kicked off, but in March of 2024 he made a major announcement. Pence informed the nation that he had no plans to endorse Trump — a man who tossed him under the bus the moment he crossed him — but that he also would not vote for Joe Biden.
It leaves Pence in a strange place in the political zeitgeist. He’s a fringe political figure who was once at the center of a hugely popular — and massively damaging — movement, but he’s since slipped into the background, disliked by MAGA for refusing to bow to Trump’s demands, but disliked by the left at large for continuing to pursue exclusionary, controlling, and dangerous endeavors that would strip American citizens of their rights.