At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Mike Pence penned two opinion columns calling for former President Bill Clinton to quit or be removed from office.
But the current vice president’s moralistic writings from the late ’90s and early 2000s, which CNN unearthed from the Wayback Machine internet archive on Monday, have not aged well.
Pence’s preachy prose on how presidents should behave, in particular, seems irreconcilable with the conduct of President Donald Trump.
In the above column, titled “The Two Schools Of Thought On Clinton” that was posted on the now-deleted website for Pence’s Indiana talk radio show, Pence argued the office of president required its incumbent to be of the highest integrity.
Pence wrote:
If you and I fall into bad moral habits, we can harm our families, our employers and our friends. The President of the United States can incinerate the planet. Seriously, the very idea that we ought to have at or less than the same moral demands placed on the Chief Executive that we place on our next door neighbor is ludicrous and dangerous. Throughout our history, we have seen the presidency as the repository of all of our highest hopes and ideals and values. To demand less is to do an injustice to the blood that bought our freedoms.
In another column on his congressional campaign website, titled “Why Clinton Must Resign Or Be Impeached,” Pence condemned Clinton’s affair with college intern Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent attempts to lie about it.
Pence concluded:
Our leaders must either act to restore the luster and dignity of the institution of the Presidency or we can be certain that this is only the beginning of an even more difficult time for our land.
It’s unclear whether Pence still believes what he wrote in his old essays. Trump is accused of multiple extramarital affairs and coverups with hush money payments. And he was recorded bragging about sexually assaulting women.