CNN —
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday will call on his party to turn away from what he describes as a growing threat of populism led by his former White House boss Donald Trump and “his populist followers and imitators.”
In a speech to be delivered at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, Pence is expected to say that “Republican voters face a choice” between conservative principles and the rising populist movement within the party, according to prepared remarks.
In his sharpest language to date against the Trump wing of the GOP, Pence is poised to say that the populists were substituting limited government and traditional values for “an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
Pence’s speech comes as he vies for the 2024 presidential nomination of a party much changed under the influence of his onetime White House partner. In his address, Pence will aim to create more sunlight between that recent past and his presidential aspirations.
“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together, we did just that,” Pence is expected to say in his New Hampshire speech. “But he and his imitators make no such promise today.”
The former vice president will also say that Trump often sounds “like an echo” of President Joe Biden and that Trump is ignoring a coming US debt crisis, according to the prepared remarks.
Pence is also poised to call out other GOP presidential contenders in his address. He will say that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “used the power of the state to punish corporations for taking a political stand he disagreed with” – a reference to DeSantis’ dispute with Disney. He will also label tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has risen in the polls in recent weeks, as “one of the former president’s populist protégés.”
Pence will argue in his remarks that populism and conservatism are two competing visions for the future of the GOP – and that Republicans in 2024 must reject populism if it wants to be a party of the Constitution.
Pence’s address, titled “Populism vs. Conservatism: Republicans’ Time for Choosing,” is a callback to Ronald Reagan’s pivotal 1964 speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid. Pence has modeled himself after the Great Communicator and has cited the conservative late president as the reason he left the Democratic Party as a young man. The second GOP presidential debate is expected to take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California later this month.
While Pence has touched on similar themes before, the title of his speech reflects the “inflection point” for the GOP, his advisers said on a Tuesday call with reporters before his address, warning that if the party chooses a presidential nominee who espouses these “unprincipled” populist ideas, it could cost Republicans the White House and affect down-ballot races. Pence will argue in his speech that conservativism and populism are “unbridgeable,” therefore Republicans must choose their core principles of limited government and the Constitution.
His advisers cautioned that Pence’s remarks are not just aimed at Trump or Ramaswamy, with whom Pence tussled at the first GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee over political experience and their visions of the nation, arguing that it would be “much too small an interpretation” of Pence’s speech.
The back-and-forth at the debate between Pence, 64, and Ramaswamy, 38, was emblematic of a generational and ideological divide within the party. Since the debate, Pence has continued criticizing Ramaswamy at campaign stops in New Hampshire, taking aim at the Ohio businessman’s isolationist “America First 2.0” approach to foreign policy.
Ahead of the speech, Pence’s advisers also mentioned South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, calling them candidates who are positioning themselves as traditional conservatives but who espouse populist views.
“Which might be even more dangerous, because it seems like it’s pandering,” a Pence adviser said on the Tuesday call with reporters.
Asked how they squared Pence delivering his anti-populist message after having served with Trump, who ushered in a new wave of populism, the advisers said that Trump governed as a conservative, and having Pence as his vice president helped him steer the administration in that direction. Pence’s advisers said Trump, who pressured his vice president to reject the 2020 election results and who faces federal charges over his attempt to overturn that defeat, is “not running as a conservative” today.
Pence will argue Wednesday that the current course led by populists could lead to a road where “our party’s relevancy will be confined to history books,” according to the prepared remarks.
“It may live on in some populist fashion, but then it will truly be, in a cruel twist, Republican in name only,” he is expected to say.
Pence’s advisers said the former vice president was approaching the speech well aware that populism’s appeal is rising, “not just in this race for president, but also in the halls of Congress and in some of the flagship institutions of our conservative movement.”
While the latest CNN poll shows Trump with a commanding lead over the rest of the Republican field, Pence’s advisers argued that a speech on conservative principles does not come too late.
There’s an “important battle right now going on over the future of our party and, in frankly, the future of our nation,” they said.