In the above clip, Lawrence O'Donnell doesn't sugarcoat it.

And about Lawrence O'Donnell, Charlie Pierce doesn't sugarcoat it, either:

RACHEL MADDOW: Still got one last point to get to, made about the hearing today, about the safety of Vice President Mike Pence, and what Mike Pence, apparently, thought President Trump might be capable of, in that moment. So, that's still to come. We will run down that from the hearing as well, sort of the last portion of our recap tonight. But again, before we get to that last point, I wanna make sure we digest what we are seeing as we go. Lawrence, some of this we know before, but not all. Certainly, we did not know all of it. But I don't think we knew about the interactions between the president and the vice president.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: Well, we have Bob Woodward's version of, in which is -- I was gonna say it's word-for-word what we heard today, but it's more than that. Bob Woodward has more words about that conversation, including, it has Mike Pence in that conversation with Donald Trump, saying, I tried everything. I tried every way to try to get around this, and I couldn't find anything. That's the person who we heard from Greg Jacob today, "never wavered." From the first moment that Mike Pence raised this question of what happened on January 6th, his aides said Mike Pence believed that he had no choice just like Al Gore had no choice. And he never wavered in that. Jacob said in this video, "he was steely and determined when he came out of that phone call with the president on January 6th." I wish he was steely and determined on December 6th, when he could've said the vice-president has no choice. And so, this drama, this tragedy, it was so much a product of Mike Pence's deliberate cowardly silence for one full month, never telling the country, ever, that the vice president had no choice. And he chose to tell the country that at 1 pm, on January 6th, when that guy with the beard, was on his way to the Capitol. And on his way to the Capitol, that guy finds out that Mike Pence, just now, betrayed us. Would that guy have gone to the Capitol, would he have gone to Washington, if Mike Pence said, a month ago, nothing can happen on January 6th? So, Mike Pence, the guy who does the right thing in the end, the question is, why did you wait until the end?

The Republican rebranding project wants to pretend there are heroes in the Republican Party who, in the end, stood up for democracy. They stood up for their own careers, always. Especially Mike Pence.

Mike Pence, who is, THIS WEEK, tweet-bragging about gas prices during the "Trump-Pence Administration."