Former Vice President Mike Pence in Manhattan in June. Amir Hamja for The New York Times.
It ain’t easy being Mike Pence these days. Adam Nagourney, a longtime political correspondent for The New York Times, spoke with Pence about his efforts to revive his political career. I asked Adam to tell us a little more about how that’s going.
In the course of my reporting on the former vice president, I texted Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s top loyalists. In his response, Bannon called him “Judas Pence.”
Bannon is a man who has been ordered to report to prison on July 1 for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence is the man who refused to help overturn the election that day. And it’s Pence who is the outlier in his own party.
Pence is an old-line Republican — much more Reagan than Trump — and is clearly frustrated with where Trump has taken the party over these past four years on issues like tariffs, debt and abortion. His argument is that Trump has moved away from the positions their administration espoused, and away from bedrock principles of the conservative movement. Indeed, these days it seems like he is more eager to promote the policies of that Trump term than Trump is himself.
But when I met Pence for an interview in Manhattan recently, he seemed surprised when I asked him if he felt like he was on an island in his own party. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and paused. “I hope not,” he said. “I hope I’m on a continent. I’m where I’ve always been since I joined the Republican Party.”
That might be true. But the Republican Party is no longer where he was when he joined it, and Pence is struggling to reconcile with that shift.
