Twitter Dug Up This Old Tweet About A Muslim Ban From Mike Pence & It's Ironic AF
On June 26, the Supreme Court voted in favor of President Donald Trump's travel ban, which prevents people from certain predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Trump has been on a mission to enforce this ban since day one of his tenure in the Oval Office, and Vice President Mike Pence — as the president's right-hand man — has stood behind his boss' intentions as well. That being said, Mike Pence's old tweet about the Muslim ban from back in the day is too ironic for me to handle right now.
In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court deemed Trump's travel ban legal after an incredibly long-winded 18-month battle in the U.S. court system. The current ban prohibits most nationals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and some Venezuelan government officials and their families, from entering the United States. The ban has been branded as a Muslim travel ban, because five of the seven countries listed are predominantly populated by Muslims.
Which is why this tweet that the Twitterverse has unearthed from Pence's archived Indiana gubernatorial Twitter account is just so ridiculous. The current vice president, who has supported the current Trump travel ban, said in a tweet from December 2015,
Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.
The internet never forgets, Mikey. People were retweeting it pretty quickly.
This tweet is pretty ironic now, considering Pence's support for the ban — which he literally applauded as Trump signed it back in early 2017. But it's not like he couldn't have known it was coming, since this ban has been such a major Trump campaign promise from the start. Trump has made it consistently clear that he does not want to allow Muslims into this country since the start of his 2016 presidential campaign.
What's worse about this particular tweet from Pence is that his statement and Trump's original promise to ban Muslims from entering the United States happened at literally the same time. And when I say literally, I mean quite literally — in fact, Pence's tweet was actually in response to Trump.
While at a rally in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on Dec. 7, 2015, Trump read out a statement that his campaign released that same day where he proclaimed, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” to a roaring applause from the crows, according to The Washington Post. And the next day, Trump's future vice president tweeted out his disapproval of his soon-to-be boss' policy.
Just a few short months later in July 2016, Trump picked Pence as his vice presidential nominee and dubbed Pence his "partner" in rebuilding the United States, according to USA Today. Clearly Pence's stance on the Muslim ban fell by the wayside due to a greater issue that Trump and Pence agreed on — Hillary Clinton. During the announcement of Pence as Trump's running mate, the vice presidential nominee declared the number one reason for accepting Trump's nomination was, "because Hillary Clinton can never become president of the United States."
Apparently that goal of Pence's superseded anything else that he cared about in this particular presidential election. In a CNN interview from October 2016, when pressed about why Pence stopped criticizing Trump on his Muslim ban, he simply said "because it's not Donald Trump's position now." (Spoiler alert: It totally was.) Pence added that he and Trump "have been very, very clear about the issue of suspending immigration from countries that have been compromised by terrorism," and said that he's "honored to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with [Trump]."
The fact that Trump's campaign promise how now come to fruition through this Supreme Court ruling is anything but funny, but you can definitely get a bit of an eye roll out of Pence's very, very obvious flip-flopping. Even though Pence is on Trump's side now, at least this ironic tweet exists so that the world can point to it as proof that the president's closest political partner once was at odds with him. It's something.
