Pence turned down Trump’s invitations to Mar-A-Lago after leaving the White House

The House select committee hearings have highlighted the tension between Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and their relationship will occupy the spotlight in the third public hearing.

The former vice president refused to carry out Trump's scheme to overturn his 2020 election loss, which witnesses say caused the former president to agree with his mob of supporters that Pence perhaps should have been hanged, but he still invited his running mate to visit at his Florida resort, reported the Washington Post.

"Pence has not spoken to Trump in more than a year and rebuffed initial invitations to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, advisers said," according to the Post. "A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment."

The former vice president has told others he may run for the Republican presidential nomination against Trump, although polling shows him trailing the ex-president and other potential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he has told donors and others that he supported Trump but did not agree he had the power to stop Joe Biden's election win.

IN OTHER NEWS: Trump flips out on the networks airing the Jan. 6 hearings

“He’s been asked in a few places here and there what his take is on it, and he generally just said, ‘The vice president has a ceremonial role there. I had no constitutional authority to do that,’” said South Carolina state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, who has organized Pence visits in his state. “We’ve been at eight events together, and of the eight events we’ve been at, it’s maybe come up four times. It hasn’t been a dominant topic.”

Advisers have noted that Trump hasn't attacked Pence the same way that he has laid into former attorney general William Barr or former defense secretary Mark Esper, while the former vice president boasts of their shared agenda.

“Mike Pence clearly delineates between being proud of the policies he helped deliver for those four years, and he sees that as separate from what he was asked and pressured to do post-election,” said GOP operative Tim Phillips. “He is proud of the policies he helped implement and he’s proud of what he did in that period after the election. He separates those things.”