Donald Trump & Mike Pence hold opposing rallies as their rivalry grows

• Donald Trump and Mike Pence held opposing rallies in Arizona on Friday.
• The events could be seen as a preview of their showdown in 2024 presidential election.
• Former Vice-President Mike Pence made stops in Arizona on Friday.

Mike Pence and Donald Trump used to work together in the White House, but now they are bitter rivals. On Friday, they held opposing rallies in Arizona, where the upcoming Republican primary election could be a preview of their possible showdown in 2024.

The series of campaign events happened a day after a congressional hearing on the attack on the US Capitol. At the hearing, a White House security official said that members of Pence’s Secret Service detail were afraid they would die as rioters broke into the building.

Trump, who like Pence is thinking about running for president in 2024, has criticised his former vice president for what he says was a failure to stop the certification of the 2020 election results and send the process back to the US states.

Trump’s staffers, who believed his disproven claim that the election was stolen, came up with such a plan, but Pence decided it would be against the law.

During the uprising on January 6, 2021, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.”

At the hearing on Thursday, people from the administration said that the social media post added fuel to the fire and made people riot against the vice president.

At the hearing, a White House national security official who did not want to be named said that “members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives.”

Trump held a rally on Friday in the town of Prescott Valley in central Arizona. It was one of a series of “Save America” rallies he has held to support the candidates he likes before the Republican primaries.

Earlier in July, he went to Alaska to support Kelly Tshibaka, who was running against Lisa Murkowski, the state’s current senator. Lisa Murkowski was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the uprising on January 6, 2021.

Trump campaigned for far-right gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, a state he narrowly lost in 2020. Lake supports Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen.

Lake, a former TV news anchor, was the first to speak in the packed stadium. He said, “We will no longer accept corruptness, and I know for a fact we will no longer accept rigged elections.”

After making the crowd wait for more than two hours, the former president began his speech by talking about immigration. This is a big campaign issue in the state, which has a long border with Mexico.

But it didn’t take him long to start thinking about the 2020 election.

He yelled, “The election was rigged and stolen and now our country is being systematically destroyed because of it!” The crowd roared in agreement.

Pence made stops in Phoenix and southern Arizona to support Karrin Taylor Robson, who is running for governor. Robson is a more traditional Republican than Lake, and she also has the support of the state’s outgoing governor, whose term is coming to an end.

As his fight with Trump gets worse, Pence has set himself up as a religious conservative with strong morals. But he hasn’t gone after Trump head-on.

On Friday, he gave a 20-minute speech to a warehouse full of people who were sitting down. He praised the policy achievements of the “four years of the Trump-Pence administration,” and only briefly criticised Lake for her past support of Democrats and initial opposition to Trump.

He said, “Arizona Republicans don’t need a governor that supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton!”

Later, though, he indirectly said that Trump and Lake were wrong to be so focused on the 2020 election.

“Democrats would love nothing more than for Republicans to take our eye off the ball and focus on days gone by,” he said in a tweet.

“If the Republican Party allows itself to become consumed by yesterday’s grievances, we will lose,” he said.

Pence has shot down rumours that he might run for president in 2024. He says that he is now focused on the midterm elections in November 2022.

Last year, he told the National Review, “Then in 2023 we’ll look around,” “We’ll go where we’re called.”

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