Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has hinted he's gearing up for a 2024 run at the presidency, is likely to make his devout Christian faith a key component of his campaign. In comments he made at the annual Spring dinner of the Gridiron Club, it seems like he wants to set his Christian bonafides apart from Donald Trump early on, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Pence's comments about Trump's role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot received a lot of press. But he also took a swipe at Trump's claims to be a Christian.
“I once invited President Trump to Bible study,” Pence said in his speech. “He really liked the passages about the smiting and perishing of thine enemies. As he put it, ‘Ya know, Mike, there’s some really good stuff in here.’”
Pence also referenced the recent classified documents scandal that's enveloping Trump, saying it's proof that he never reads his Bible.
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“I read that some of those classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago were actually stuck in the president’s Bible … which proves he had absolutely no idea they were there," Pence said.
According to The Post, while there's no video of Pence's speech, some wondered if he made his remarks to a room full of journalists knowing that they would eventually become public.
"It might be tempting to write off Pence’s comments as a one-off attempt at politically barbed comedy. But he’s drawn this kind of contrast before," writes The Post's Olivier Knox. "In a November 2022 Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled 'My Last Days With Donald Trump,' drawn from his memoir 'So Help Me God,' Pence laid out a timeline of events leading to the Jan. 6 riot that violently disrupted the peaceful handover of power for the first time in American history."
Read the full report over at The Washington Post.