Former vice president Mike Pence took aim at former president Donald Trump and his “populist followers and imitators” during a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday titled, “Populism vs. Conservatism: Republicans’ Time for Choosing.”
Pence told a crowd at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College that Republican voters “face a choice” between conservative principles and the rising populist movement. He said populists are replacing limited government and traditional values with “an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
Pence warned that leaning into populism could lead to a future where “our party’s relevancy will be confined to history books.”
“It may live on in some populist fashion, but then it will truly be, in a cruel twist, Republican in name only,” he said.
“Will we choose to go down the path of populism and decline? I believe we stand at a crossroads,” Pence said. “I have faith that Republican voters will once again choose the good way.”
— Team Pence (@TeamPence) September 6, 2023
Pence took direct aim at his former running mate. “The Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015,” Pence said, referring to Trump’s presidential announcement at Trump Tower in New York.
“Donald Trump, along with his populist followers and imitators — some of whom are also seeking the Republican presidential nomination — often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House,” Pence said.
He also suggested Trump’s position on entitlement reform is “identical” to President Biden’s.
Trump called on Republican lawmakers not to “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security” when they began negotiations with President Biden and Democrats over a measure to raise the debt ceiling in January. “Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there is plenty of it. . . . But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it,” Trump said at the time.
Pence went on to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for having “used the power of the state to punish corporations for taking a political stand he disagreed with.” The comment seemingly referred to DeSantis’s ongoing feud with Disney, which filed a lawsuit against the governor and other state leaders in April accusing them of participating in a “targeted campaign of government retaliation” against the company that began last year when it spoke out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.
Pence, meanwhile, also called political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy “one of former president’s populist protégés” and knocked his support for raising the inheritance tax.
But the former vice president’s advisers told reporters ahead of the speech on Tuesday that the former vice president’s remarks are not directed specifically toward Trump or Ramaswamy. It would be “much too small an interpretation” of his speech to focus on any one political figure, the advisers said.
They also accused former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott of claiming to be classical conservatives while adopting some populist views. “Which might be even more dangerous, because it seems like it’s pandering,” an adviser said.
Pence warned that the move toward populism over conservatism could strip America from it’s role as a global leader and erode constitutional norms.
While some may question how Pence can distance himself from the populist movement after having served with Trump, the former vice president said: “When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together, we did just that. But he and his imitators make no such promise today.”
Pence’s speech, which is a callback to Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid, comes weeks before the second presidential debate is set to take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.