Mike Pence’s story began long before 2016. I remember Representative Mike Pence from the 9/11 era. I remember Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. My impression of him from that era was rather mixed, in large part because of that (rather fraught) governorship — the rhetoric was A+ orthodox Reaganite conservatism delivered with actual feeling, the execution less so.

When he was selected as Trump’s vice-presidential pick, I remember thinking it was both the most obvious and necessary pick possible. Pence was the un-Trump in terms of his impeccable personal life and dignified public bearing, an establishment figure meant to signal that the grownups were supervising playtime — but also cleverly safe for Trump’s ego in that Pence would keep his head down and avoid the spotlight like a small woodland creature trying not to anger an owl. When push came to shove, I figured, he was the type who would roll over quiescently and provide a respectable-looking front for Trump without ever standing up to the man on any serious point of principle.

I have been wrong before, but rarely in such spectacularly dramatic and televised fashion. Nothing more need be said about the events of January 6 (and its resultant effect on Mike Pence’s reputation with Trump’s supporters) other than that the man did his duty under immense pressure, including not just the riot but what we now know to have been a well-coordinated internal push to get him to play along with attempts to overturn the election. Furthermore, never at any point was it in question that Pence would do his constitutional duty — he was not up for sale or subject to intimidation on the matter. (His primary campaign was thus predictably stillborn.)

Pence has always held a special fascination for me as the most prominent member of that fading Republican “old guard” of my political youth, the foot-soldiers of a conservative movement that once took the idea of personal and public decency as seriously as the idea of actually governing. I miss it. Pence’s presidential campaign — with its appeals to the Republican foreign-policy verities of 2012 and the social-policy think-tank ideas of 1998 — seemed poignantly frozen in amber compared even to the more respectable competitors like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, to say nothing of kamikaze pilot-fishes like Vivek Ramaswamy. And yet for all its stolid anachronism, it reminded me of the era of the Republican Party — as a vehicle for conservative ideology — that first attracted me when I was young: commonsense traditional values matched with a seriousness and intellectual purpose about the issues facing America, as opposed to our present weightlessness and drift.

So it was no surprise to me that Pence announced this Friday that he would not be endorsing Donald Trump in the November 2024 election — he was at pains to add that under no circumstances would he endorse or vote for Joe Biden — because he simply concluded the man was unworthy of office. In typical Pence fashion, he did it without pomposity or apocalyptic rhetoric; appearing on Fox News with Martha McCallum, he chalked it up to irreconcilable differences. “Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda we governed on during our four years. And that is why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign.” He mentioned January 6, of course, but also Trump’s backpedaling on abortion issues as well as his contradictory positioning on TikTok and China. For all progressives hoping Pence would go on Fox to quit the Republican Party while screaming “THEY’RE HERE ALREADY! YOU’RE NEXT!” like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, no such luck — he came to disagree on points of substance, not rend his garments performatively for the pleasure of the Biden campaign.

It’s impossible not to respect Pence’s consistency, his restraint, and his refusal to be baited into discussing anything else. While the rest of the mainstream media was gathering pitchforks this weekend and baying over Trump’s supposed threats of a “bloodbath” should he not win, Mike Pence was on Face the Nation saying this in response to the clip:

First, I want to, I want to commend you, Margaret, for putting that in context. I woke up this morning, seeing online all the discussion about “bloodbath.” And as you’ve just reflected, the president was clearly talking about the impact of, of imports, devastating the American automotive industry.

You and I watched January 6 on television and social media. Mike Pence lived through it, and as the man directly under siege, no less. Yet there he was — during an appearance scheduled literally so he could explain why he wasn’t endorsing Donald Trump in November — calmly explaining the difference between the man’s real failings and his imagined ones. He’s not doing this as a favor to Trump, or the Republican Party, or even the conservative movement. A person stops to stipulate something like that instead of taking the easy, cheap shot or passing over it without comment for one reason only: because there’s no point in bothering with any of this except to tell the truth as he sees it.

And that is what has distinguished Pence in the twilight of his career. As I said already, his presidential campaign last year felt beamed in from a different era of our politics. But it’s important to emphasize that it was also a better era, one where you actually could reasonably expect politicians not only to conduct themselves with a measure of self-respect but take the principles they enunciate seriously. No sudden “evolutions” for the sake of media relevance or Strange New Respect, no heel turns, just old-fashioned conservative principles, however out of step with the mood of the party they might be. Mike Pence will never be president, but his reward for the choices he made during his career (and particularly near its end) is that history will judge him kindly: as the man he claimed to be. Few win a more worthy epitaph.