Former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News's Martha MacCallum on "The Story" that he wouldn't endorse his former running mate, Donald Trump, for president.
“Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign,” Pence said on Fox News.
"I'm incredibly proud of the record of our administration. It was a conservative record that made America more prosperous, more secure and saw conservatives appointed to our courts in a more peaceful world."
Pence, as the presiding officer during the certification of electoral votes, believed he did not have the power under the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to return disputed electoral votes to the states. This forever angered Donald Trump and many of his supporters and made him an enemy of the former president.
"[We have] our differences on my constitutional duties that I exercised on January 6 [2021]," he said.
Mike Pence sees himself as a principled person, informed by a devout faith. During his short-lived run for president, he tried to highlight some of his differences with Trump while walking a very narrow line between criticism and loyalty. Until now.
“As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt. I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life. And this last week, his reversal on getting tough on China and supporting our administration’s efforts to force a sale of ByteDance’s TikTok,” he said.
Washington Post:
Pence told Fox News that he will keep his November vote private but emphasized that he will not vote for Trump’s Democratic opponent, President Biden.
During his campaign announcement in June, Pence excoriated the former president for his actions during the Jan. 6 attack and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. At the time, Pence declared: “Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”
Pence had no shot at the nomination after that statement. It was all downhill from there for his campaign.
Pence has also recently called out Trump for his changing position on the sanctity of life and entitlement programs. But where Pence and Trump disagreed most was on the nature of "populism" and its threat to conservatism.
Instead of campaigning for Trump, Pence said he would spend the rest of the year building support for a “broad mainstream conservative agenda.” Last month, a Pence-aligned group announced a $20 million effort to combat what it called the GOP’s “drift toward populism.”
Pence has likened populism to progressivism, saying populism is made of “little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
“Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party we’ve long known will cease to exist,” Pence said in a September speech. “And the fate of American freedom would be in doubt.”
Some MAGA Republicans wouldn't mind seeing the current Republican Party disappear.
Pence is one of the last Reaganites, not only in policy agreement but also in temperament. I said when he ran for president that he was a "Christian gentleman." That was never going to be enough to beat Trump.
