A Wide-Ranging Conversation with Mike Pence

F ormer vice president Mike Pence appeared Friday at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit, engaging in a wide-ranging conversation with National Review editor in chief Rich Lowry.

On the issue of supporting efforts to repel the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pence implicitly drew a contrast between himself on one hand and Donald Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis on the other. “Let me be clear about what’s going on in Eastern Europe,” he said. “It’s not a territorial dispute. It’s not an argument over borders and nations. It’s a Russian invasion. And it’s simply Vladimir Putin’s latest effort to redraw international lines by force.”

Pence noted that while Putin invaded Georgia during the Bush administration and Crimea during the Obama administration, “Our administration is the only administration in the 21st century where Vladimir Putin did not even attempt to redraw international lines by force.” Pence attributed that fact to the Trump-Pence administration’s hawkish policies, including “historic investments in our national defense,” firing “58 cruise missiles into Syria,” unleashing “our armed forces to take down the ISIS caliphate,” and “taking down Qasem Soleimani.”

“We demonstrated a willingness to use American force to prosecute our interests,” he said. “I don’t think Vladimir Putin wanted to find out what would happen if he tested that theory across the borders of Ukraine.”

Pence said military aid to Ukraine is in line with the Reagan Doctrine of helping anti-communist forces in the 1980s. “We’re the leader of the free world,” he said. “We are the arsenal of democracy, and those who say that we cannot call on our allies and give the Ukrainians what we need to repel this Russian invasion and solve our problems here at home [simultaneously] have a pretty small view of the greatest nation on Earth.”

On the issues of debt and spending, Pence said:

Now is not the time for the United States of America to be cutting defense spending. What we ought to be doing is making investments in the military that we need today, the military we may need tomorrow to defend our nation and defend our treaty interests. And that will require us to deal with the looming debt crisis. . . . We’ve got to come to terms with the national debt and the size of our nation’s economy for the sake of our national security, for the sake of our prosperity. And I’m determined to be the voice of that in the days ahead. I promise you.

As for the debt-ceiling standoff in particular, Pence said he respects “Speaker McCarthy’s decision to take Social Security and Medicare out of the debt-ceiling debate, as a tactical matter. . . . It’s too, too big, it’s too important to be dealt with on a short-term basis.”

“The Constitution requires us to honor the full faith and credit of the United States of America. We have to find a way to do that,” he said, adding that fighting for “some budget cuts” was “fully reasonable” and a “fight we need to win.”

On the topic of the underwhelming 2022 GOP midterm performance, Pence blamed GOP candidates who focused on relitigating the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election:

There actually was a red wave in lots of places. In Iowa, for the first time in 75 years, every member of the House of Representatives is a Republican. They sent four new [Republican] congressmen from the State of New York. . . . We saw statewide [candidates] winning in landslides in places like Georgia and Florida and Texas and Iowa.

We saw some great results, but we saw some disappointments in places that we should have won. And I think the common denominator is that our candidates in 2022 that were focused on the challenges the American people are facing today and focused on the future did very well. But candidates that were focused on the past, particularly candidates that were focused on relitigating the last election, did not fare as well, including in places that we should have won — and won handily.

On the topic of gender ideology, Pence said he strongly favors banning surgeries and hormone treatments for minors who think they are transgender:

Calling out the radical Left on the destruction of women’s sports in this country — it’s a fight that we can win. I truly believe the overwhelming majority of the American people understand the primacy of parents’ rights and the need to protect children from making decisions with regard to their body and their physiology before their ages [of majority] without notification or consent. I’m heartily supportive of efforts in Indiana and elsewhere that simply prohibit chemical and medical/surgical changes to children before the age of majority. We’ve got to push back on this transgender agenda in very real ways.

“I think we speak truth without apology: Boys cannot become girls and girls cannot become boys,” Pence said. “This cuts uniquely at the whole notion of parents’ rights.” He pointed to a school in Iowa where “your child can get a gender-transition plan from the health department at this public school without ever notifying you as a parent or getting your permission. Now, at the same school a student has to bring a signed permission slip to get a Tylenol from the school nurse. That’s a radical gender ideology. I mean, that’s not just a bad policy — that’s crazy.”

Asked about the news of the day — the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — Pence said that the “unprecedented indictment on the former president of the United States for campaign-finance issues is an outrage, and I think it’s clear to the overwhelming majority of people that this is nothing short of a political prosecution being effected by a Manhattan DA who literally campaigned on bringing charges against one particular American.”

“That should be offensive to every American, left, right and center. What every American deserves [is] equal treatment under the law. And I believe the American people will see this for what it is,” Pence added. The answer for conservatives “is not to become like them. The answer is to return to a commitment to the foundations of the rule of law enshrined in the Constitution.”

Pence said the indictment “sends a terrible message to the wider world about American justice. Because I have to tell you there are dictators and authoritarians around the world that will point to that to justify their own abuse of their own so-called justice system.”

“The key I think for conservatives going forward, the key for leaders in our party going forward is not to be preoccupied on these issues but to continue to focus on the real challenges facing the American people at home and abroad and ensure that we elect leadership that will turn this country back to commonsense conservative principles in 2024,” he continued.

“I was in Iowa this week, New Hampshire a little bit ago — very nice states [to] visit this time of year,” Pence said, drawing some laughs for his unsubtle hint at plans for a 2024 presidential campaign. “I was at the Machine Shed in Des Moines a couple of days ago. I took questions for an hour. Nobody brought up all these different investigations and the drama that is an obsession of much of the national media.”

He also touted the Trump-Pence administration’s “extraordinary conservative achievements”: “We made the largest increases in our national defense since the days of Ronald Reagan, we cut taxes, rolled back regulation, unleashed American energy, [sent] 300 conservatives to our federal courts.”

It all added up to a pretty simple pitch: Pence would allow Republicans to build on the policy successes of the Trump-Pence administration without the chaos of Trump in the White House. It’s a pitch that hasn’t yet earned Pence much support in the polls, but it appears increasingly likely he’ll be delivering it as a declared presidential candidate in the months to come.