Mark Leibovich: “You can’t blame Mike Pence for wanting to keep his head down in this presidential election, given that he nearly had his head in a noose after the last one.

“‘I’m staying out of this race,’ Pence said plaintively—more plaintively even than usual—in a rare interview with Lyndsay Keith on something called Merit Street Media (founded, apparently, by Dr. Phil). Pence sat stiffly, and his voice was hushed and dramatic, as it typically is. He was repeating what he has said before: that he could not support Donald Trump after everything the former president had done, and that he could never back Kamala Harris, either, because of what he holds sacred—namely ‘the sanctity of life,’ which is the ‘calling of our time.’

“‘I’ve made it clear I won’t be endorsing,’ he reiterated. ‘How I vote, I will keep to myself.’

“But it’s not so simple for Pence. He can try to opt out, but his ordeal inevitably makes him an inescapable figure in this cliff-hanger for American democracy.

“At so many turns, his absence has spoken louder than his presence ever could. He is a reminder of Trump’s abject indecency, the former president’s pitiless trampling of norms and the consequence-free zone afforded him by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court.”

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