Move over, Chris Christie, there’s a new anti-Trump sheriff in town, and his name is Mike Pence.
The former Vice President laid out his vision for his upcoming campaign and blasted his former boss in the process. Not only is Donald Trump unfit for the presidency, but, in Pence’s view, he shouldn’t even be running or be in consideration for the job.
According to reports, Pence hit Trump on several fronts during his first campaign event in Iowa:
Former Vice President Mike Pence kicked off his bid for the Republican presidential nomination Wednesday by accusing his two-time running mate, former President Donald Trump, of abandoning conservatism and standing against the Constitution on Jan. 6.
“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative, and together we did just that,” Pence said. “Today, he makes no such promise.”
Pence cited abortion as a prominent example of Trump’s drifting away from the party’s conservative principles.
“The sanctity of life has been our party’s calling for half a century — long before Donald Trump was ever a part of it,” Pence said. “Now he treats it as an inconvenience, even blaming election losses in 2022 on overturning Roe v. Wade.”
Those remarks, coupled with a rebuke of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, represent Pence’s most aggressive public repudiation of Trump ever.
A president who put himself above the Constitution — and asked his vice president to do the same — “should never be president of the United States again,” Pence said.
Mike Pence isn’t going to be the 2024 Republican nominee any more than Chris Christie is. Both are marginal players, at best, and both are on a similar trajectory of attacking Donald Trump as their bread and butter.
Writing at CNN, columnist John Avlon says Pence should be the “candidate of true conservatives’ dreams”:
Pence is, on paper, perhaps the most conservative candidate in the race. I was struck by his repetition of a favorite line: “I’m a Christian, a conservative and a Republican — in that order.” Contrast that with the mid-20th century formulation popularized by President Lyndon Johnson: “I am a free man, an American, a United States Senator and a Democrat — in that order.” The elevation of religion and ideology in that litany is both a sign of the times and Pence’s political identity.
If nothing was learned from 2016, where Sen. Ted Cruz was arguably the “most conservative on paper,” then there isn’t much to say about this analysis of Pence.
The Republican Party has shifted from looking for the “most conservative” candidate to looking for a fighter capable of winning a political street brawl. It’s not enough to check the boxes if a candidate is unwilling to advance the cause into enemy territory and score some victories.
Pence was part of the “Trump train” since 2016 and he played loyal foot soldier to his boos with a sense of duty and loyalty, up to a point.
In that regard, Pence holds his opinions of Trump but most Trump-backers see Pence as a traitor and a disloyal backstabber to the man who elevated his national profile. There was a day when Pence was the clear successor to Trump as the next in line. Many Trump backers would’ve supported Pence if not merely for his loyalty alone.
Those days are long gone and Pence is now striking out on his own unique anti-Trump path in 2024.
The bottom line is that with Pence in the race, alongside Christie and others like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, the field is becoming exactly what Trump wants it to be in 2024. A splintered collection of candidates competing in overlapping lanes while Trump rides out with anywhere from 40-60% of the vote.
In a way, Pence is doing Trump a favor by expanding the field even more and carving another 5 percent away from DeSantis.
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