Mike Pence is not the coward that Donald Trump said he is. But he can’t have it both ways

The worst thing that perpetual middle schooler Donald Trump could think to call Mike Pence when the vice president stood up to him on Jan. 6, 2021, was a synonym for female genitalia.

Yes, our former president likes the p-word word a lot. He likes to grab ‘em, he has told us. And likes to accuse those who won’t cave to him of being one.

There’s no doubt now that the opposite is true, even more than we knew: One of the boldest Trump lies exposed by Thursday’s hearing on the former president’s plot against America is that Pence lacks courage.

The man’s life was in danger from the howling mob that his own boss, our own president, had pointed in his direction, and then had whipped into a murderous frenzy.

If you doubt any part of this, then you did not watch the hearing, at which one Republican after another testified in harrowing detail about how close Pence came — 40 feet — to being overtaken by insurrectionists shouting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

We who watched also saw how Trump’s anti-Pence rhetoric at his pre-coup rally, and the tweet he sent mid-coup — while everyone around Trump was begging him to call off the seditionists — “poured gasoline on the fire” of anger at Pence, as Trump press aide Sarah Matthews put it.

Pence did not do what the president wanted him to do that day because, his aides said, he knew that Trump had lost. And because he knew, too, that he did not have the power to declare whatever winner he chose. “I had no right to change the outcome,” he has said. Trump knew that, too, but pressured him anyway.

The vice president put the country ahead of his own safety, refusing to leave the Capitol before certifying that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. He behaved heroically that day.

I don’t find it too baffling that even though Trump took actions that could easily have resulted in Pence’s death, the former vice president never speaks ill of the man whose indifference to his survival was criminal.

Why? Pence is an old-school conservative Republican who would not only like to win the White House but would like to return the country to that quaintly pre-Trump time when those who lost elections then conceded them.

To do either, he’d have to win over a good number of the majority of Republicans who believe, just as the Jan. 6 mob did, that Trump really did win.

If you really thought that, then standing up against a stolen election would be patriotic. Trump’s aides have made clear that they did not think that, and repeatedly told him so.

But that’s why Pence can’t possibly succeed, either in a presidential run or in his attempt to return our country to a time when differences were over policy rather than loyalty oaths to a leader whose only goal is to make money off his marks.

Because to do that, he’d have to stop trying to have it both ways. He’d have to be a lot plainer about the criminal under whom he served. He’d have to be a lot less oblique in his attempts to help Republicans see that the 2020 election was not stolen.

Right now, Pence’s party is still so hopelessly in thrall to the former huckster-in-chief that whatever he does isn’t likely to boost his presidential chances.

Today’s GOP doesn’t want “normal,” or else would not reward insurrection, scandal and everyday rudeness. They don’t want someone who has behaved bravely, but someone with bravado.

What Pence has to sell, his fellow Rs aren’t buying right now. And running against everything that Trump represents without ever really saying so is not going to work.

Pence has a different, even more important race to run.

The vice president’s former counsel, Greg Jacob, testified on Thursday that on Jan. 6, he turned to the Bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den. Daniel is thrown to the lions because “he refuses an order from the king. He cannot follow” in good conscience, and so does the right thing instead, putting his life in jeopardy in the process. “And I felt that’s what had played out that day,” Jacob said.

Unlike Trump, King Darius was thrilled to see that his second-in-command had survived the night. Yet yes, that is what had played out that day.

And now, Pence needs to be Daniel one more time, again putting his country first by telling the truth without any hedging. Not because it will help him politically, but despite the fact that it very likely won’t.