It appears that Mike Pence will make a 2024 presidential bid.
In a less-than-subtle response, Vice President Mike Pence said, “Well, there might be somebody else I’d prefer more,” when asked whether he would support Donald Trump if the former President campaigned for office again on Wednesday at a Georgetown University event.
Me, I’m talking about me, he ought to have added.
More intriguing than that, though, was how Pence hinted he would actually run against Trump given that it has been known for some time that the former vice president intends to run for president.
Here is that quote, which comes from Pence’s appearance on Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation: “The core values of our movement—security, limited government, liberty, and life—cannot be abandoned. But we also must let the seductive call of a populist movement devoid of morals and disconnected from our most valued principles to lead our movement astray.”
The previous President is all over Pence’s remarks, even though he doesn’t specifically reference Trump there.
The expression “the siren call of unprincipled populism that’s unmoored from our oldest traditions and most beloved principles” comes to mind when thinking of Trump’s actions before, during, and after the 2020 election.
Trump insisted that he must be correct because he didn’t think he could lose and was able to persuade a sizable number of GOP voters of that. Furthermore, he believed that everything that followed — including the fictitious lawsuits, the unfounded accusations of fraud, and, yes, even what occurred on January 6, 2021 — was justified.
Remember how, on that gloomy day, during a phone discussion with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Trump summed up his irrational populism in the phrase “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more angry about the election than you are.”
Populism without of principles would be that. It’s a confirmation that whatever the crowd believes must necessarily be true (even if you’ve been fueling the mob with election-related lies for months).
And that’s the point at which Pence and Trump most obviously diverged. Because he did not have a constitutionally mandated role to play in the electoral vote count on January 6, Pence rejected the campaign of pressure by Trump and others in his entourage to refuse to recognise the electoral vote total. Trump lacked this kind of moral compass; his main motivation was the need to succeed at any costs.
Will the Republican Party of today support a presidential campaign centred on the premise that Trump embodies a perilous populist movement? Count on me being dubious since Trump has demonstrated throughout the 2022 midterm primary season that he still has control over the party’s base, which appears to be eager to follow Trump wherever he goes.