Mike Pence just gave a bizarre answer about why he didn’t join Donald Trump’s deranged church photo op

| 10:30 pm EDT June 12, 2020
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If you’d told us the Trump White House was taking a field trip to a church for the sake of a blatantly disingenuous photo op with a Bible, we’d have expected Mike Pence to be the first one to sign up. After all, he’s a disingenuous “Christian” who doesn’t believe in a single thing that Christ tried to teach.

Yet when you consider just how poorly the church photo op stunt has played out for everyone involved, perhaps Mike Pence simply knew enough not to get involved in the disaster. Pence is a deranged extremist, but he likes to position himself as a mild mannered soft spoken reasonable guy. We’ve already seen General Milley apologize for having been involved, Secretary Esper make lame excuses, and Attorney General Bill Barr try to shift the blame. Now Pence is speaking up about the stunt, and it’s not clear what he’s trying to do.

Mike Pence is telling CBS News that he was “encouraged” not go on the church photo op field trip “out of an abundance of caution” because it was a “volatile” situation and the president and vice president shouldn’t be out together. This is actually a valid concern – or at least it would have been, if the peaceful protesters were violent, or if there were any danger involved.

What’s bizarre here is that Mike Pence is making a point of reminding everyone that he didn’t go on the photo op. He’s not condemning it; in fact he’s generically praising Trump for having done it. But this feels like a weird opportunist attempt at making sure everyone knows that Pence wasn’t a part of Trump’s stunt – and we suspect that’s why Pence sat it out to begin with.