Like most other Republicans supposedly up against Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination, his former veep, Mike Pence, made a show on Saturday complaining about Trump’s unprecedented indictment by a Justice Department led by the current president of the United States. United States and potential political rival.

As if persecuting Trump on his face is a bad thing, and Joe Biden is the bad guy.

Well, here are a few other things that are unprecedented:

Trump’s behavior, for example. After leaving office and still refusing to admit defeat, he willingly kept hundreds of classified documents, including military attack plans; stored unsecured, even next to a toilet; showed some of these documents to visitors; and conspired with an aide to withhold the subpoenaed goods from the US government. All of this is described in his own words and those of his associates and is alleged in the criminal charges for which he was arrested and arraigned on Tuesday.

And then there is the unprecedented spectacle of candidates choosing to run against Trump, but then not actually running against him. Sheepish deference to Trump describes most of the nine Republicans supposedly fighting to prevent him from winning their party’s presidential nomination.

This phenomenon defies the very point of electoral politics: persuading voters why they should choose you and not someone else, a goal usually pressed all the harder against a front-runner or incumbent. (Trump, who has led most Republican voters to believe he won in 2020, is in fact both an incumbent and the distant front-runner for the 2024 nomination.)

How in the world can Pence and the rest of these long shots be anything but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is languishing in single digits in the polls, and he is an average of 30 percentage points behind Trump and thinks they will overcome him without at least trying to convince his supporters of the truth: the former president is clearly unfit to run for president again are.

Why run if you don’t do what it takes to win? Some, it is speculated, aspire to become Trump’s vice president. Ask Pence how that turned out.

Trump’s challengers are so wary of offending his supporters that they can’t bring themselves to convict him of the extraordinarily credible charges in the indictment, or even comment on the damning evidence. Instead, they reflect Trump’s own BS, portraying him as a victim of Special Counsel Jack Smith, the Justice Department, the FBI, and ultimately Biden, who have somehow conspired to weaponize the government’s levers. , third world style, to bring down a political rival.

How do you beat someone if you don’t talk about them? How do you beat them if you don’t want to differentiate yourself from them?

That’s what the former governor of New Jersey asked. Chris Christie, one of only two truth-tellers in the Republican race, spoke Monday night at a CNN town hall. The other observer is the former governor. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, to an ex-federal prosecutor who said, “Obviously it’s a very solid charge. The grand jury, not Biden, not the Justice Department found probable cause for it.

Unfortunately, Christie and Hutchinson aren’t enough to take Trump down when the seven others go head-to-head.

Pence ventured over the weekend when the indictment was perhaps the latest example of a Justice Department working on an injustice. You would think he believes I don’t understand why Pence would target and undermine the country’s top law enforcement agency instead of the man who not only stole military secrets, but also, as Pence has said, put him and his family in endangered. on January 6, 2021.

Before DeSantis even read the indictment, he tweetedThe arming of federal law enforcement poses a mortal threat to a free society. While DeSantis is the center of Trump’s campaign sneer on a daily basis, he led the fantastic band of Trump rivals into whataboutism, drawing false comparisons between Trump’s treatment by the Justice Department and that of Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

The reaction of Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was Trump’s United Nations ambassador, evolving, shall we say. she initially blamed the prosecution’s overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics for Trump’s indictment. On Monday, she even went so far as to say so on Fox News

if

this indictment is where President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security. Still, she told right-wing radio hosts on Tuesday that as president she would be “inclined” to pardon Trump if convicted.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott accused Biden and the Justice Department, without evidence, of targeting and preying on Republicans. For what it’s worth, when Prosecutor Smith took over the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Division, he reviewed the evidence and dropped separate investigations into several senior Republican congressmen for corruption.

Governor of North Dakota. Doug Burgum refuses to ever mention Trump when he campaigns; he has only said that Republican voters find the charges against He Who Shall Not Be Named unfair. At the other extreme, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, takes the prize for the most blatant commitment to the MAGA base: he popped up outside the Miami courthouse where Trump was charged with reiterating his promise to pardon Trump on Day 1 of President Ramaswamy’s term.

Sure, Trump is innocent until proven guilty. But that’s in a court of law. It is up to his political rivals to argue for themselves and against Trump in the court of public opinion, to try and change the mind of the twice-indicted (so far) former president.

Perhaps an anti-Trump message is unmarketable to Republican voters. For many it will be. But if the rivals don’t try, they just have to limp away from this so-called race. That may not be unprecedented, but it would be welcome.

@jackiekcalmes