MSNBC’s Brian Williams said Thursday night that former Vice President Mike Pence—who spoke earlier in the evening in New Hampshire—is “perfectly willing to be the conductor of the Trump Train,” despite being targeted by rioting Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “This was his chance to draw a little distance with Trump, but no, he’s just a boy standing in front of New Hampshire, asking them to love him,” Williams said on The 11th Hour.

Speaking at the GOP Lincoln-Reagan Dinner in Manchester, Pence made his first public comments about the Capitol attack, saying of Trump “I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye to eye on that day, but I will always be proud of what we accomplished for the American people over the last four years.”

Williams’ guest David Plouffe, former campaign manager for Barack Obama, described Pence’s January 6 comments as “it’s like he’s saying ‘well, Donald Trump and I didn’t see eye to eye on the fact that he instigated an assassination attempt against me.’ It’s an unbelievable thing to say.”

Williams cited a piece by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer entitled “The Capitol Rioters Won,” where Serwer argues that “Republicans are not blocking a bipartisan January 6 commission because they fear Trump, or because they want to “move on” from 2020. They are blocking a January 6 commission because they agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized.”

Serwer describes the debate inside the Republican Party today as “not whether election laws should be changed to better ensure Republican victory, but whether political violence is necessary to achieve that objective.”