The Time I Almost Got Mike Pence Killed

This ABC piece ran yesterday and reminded me of one of the weirdest things in my entire political life: the time one of our ads almost got Mike Pence killed.

Pence told special counsel harrowing details about 2020 election aftermath: Sources

We ran this spot in Washington and Palm Beach in December 2020. Why? Why else but to cause division and chaos inside the ranks of Trump world?

We knew Pence could have been a lynchpin in Trump’s plan to invalidate the results of 2020, so we asserted that Pence was already going to betray Trump. We wanted to break Trump’s faith and trust in Pence.

Newsweek and a lot of other outlets covered it: Lincoln Project Ad Tells Trump That Pence 'Will Put the Nail in Your Political Coffin'

Here’s the piece:

We knew that the GOP legal community had largely crossed the political Rubicon and was building up an elaborate skein of lies and legal fantasies to hand Trump a victory when he’d been defeated by Biden a few weeks before. We also knew January 6th would be an essential inflection point, given Pence’s constitutional role in the certification process.

We dropped this ad on their heads. Pence wrote about it in his book:

“It worked,” he said. “During a December cabinet meeting, President Trump told me the ad ‘looked bad for you.’ I replied that it wasn’t true: I had fully supported the legal challenges to the election and would continue to do so.”

But we knew better. We knew Pence’s vestigial urge to follow the law would

What we didn’t anticipate was the scope and scale of January 6th or that Trump’s plan that day was, in part, to shock and intimidate his own Vice President with a violent mob.

I’ll never forget watching the attack unfold. I was on the phone with my friend and colleague Tara Setmayer that afternoon, and when the breach of the Senate Chamber was broadcast, as chants of “Hang Mike Pence” and “Bring Out Pence rang through the Capitol, I whispered, “Oh God. I got Mike Pence killed.” For several long hours, Pence and his detail hid out in the Senate garage as a violent mob stormed the Capitol, hunting him.

Had they found him, I have no doubt the Secret Service would have done their duty to protect him to the last man, but it might have been a closer-run thing than anyone would have hoped. The mob got within 100 feet of Pence; it was a narrow escape.

Weirdly, when Pence did the right thing that night and let the certification move forward, I felt sorry for him. As deep as he was in the Trump cult, he’d put the country before Trump for one single moment and inevitably would be punished for it. His doomed 2024 campaign proved that.

Even now, he doesn’t understand it wasn’t our ad that put his life in danger (or, in his more ludicrous assertion that…wait for it…the Lincoln Project caused January 6th) but Trump’s movement and mob.

We just told the truth about what he’d do, and in Trump's world, there’s no greater sin.

I’ve produced perhaps 1500 ads in my career. I remember only some of them with absolute clarity.

This is one.