On Saturday, we brought you video from the Munich Security Conference, an annual event attended by officials from around the world, that showed Vice President Mike Pence addressing the crowd and at one point getting a slightly different reaction than his speechwriter clearly planned on.
It’s common practice for dignitaries, celebrities — even just awards show hosts — to prepare their speeches in advance and include text in what they’re reading that reminds them to allow a few seconds for applause. It’s relatively easy to predict what lines you’ll deliver that will garner praise from your audience, especially if you’re a speaker well used to the podium or a speechwriter for someone who is.
But by now you know, especially if you read our coverage on Saturday, that when Pence brought up Donald Trump at the conference, he did just that — allowed some time for applause — and unfortunately for the Vice President, none came. What’s worse, he clearly thought he wasn’t waiting long enough and that the audience simply hadn’t realized it was time to clap… So the pause is extremely long and extremely awkward:
That’s brutal.
But it looks like the White House had one final humiliation in store for the hapless Veep: They tried to pull a Donald Trump on the whole affair and insist that the crowd did indeed clap after the part where he mentioned Trump. Now, that video’s only 37 seconds long, and three of that is where I threw our fancy logo shift at the end, so if you haven’t watched it yet, do so now.
Okay, did you notice the part where you could literally hear a pin drop like 6 blocks away?
Because the White House definitely didn’t notice that part when they posted the official transcript of the speech:
Then again, maybe they did — because that’s not even the speech as Pence delivered it. It’s very definitely marked on the White House site as “Remarks by Vice President Pence at the 2019 Munich Security Conference | Munich, Germany.” They not only lied about the part where nobody clapped when he mentioned Trump, but they also tried to cover the whole thing up by posting the wrong speech entirely so they could deny that they added the “applause” indicator after the fact.
It almost goes without saying at this point that the White House is just generally lying about everything. But about whether or not a crowd clapped? President Snowflake must have been furious.
Featured image via screen capture
