As Trump Strays, Mike Pence Urges Conservatives to Return to Their Roots
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Mike Pence was elated. For decades, he had decried the decision and championed the right to life. Much has changed on the right since Donald Trump’s first term, in which Pence helped shape the judicial appointments that led to the court’s landmark ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the former vice president remains palpably proud of his work.
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“I think the appointment of three of the justices that sent Roe to the ash heap of history, where it belongs, was a historic and generational achievement that will endure,” Pence told National Review in a phone interview.
Since the beginning of his second term, however, President Trump has distanced himself and his administration from the pro-life movement. He placed the openly pro-choice Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and when the Food and Drug Administration approved a generic form of the abortion drug mifepristone for commercial use, Trump did nothing to intervene despite the urging of Republicans.
Pence is candid about his frustration with these developments. He describes Trump’s actions as “inconsistent with the basic expectations of a pro-life administration.” But the right to life isn’t the only issue on which Trump has broken with conservative orthodoxy.
Pence stands by the victories of Trump’s first term, many of which — tax reform, widespread deregulation, and the Abraham Accords among them — fit comfortably within the Reaganite mold. But since his return to office, Trump has embraced tariffs, price controls, and other entanglements of the state and the private sector. On foreign policy, he’s antagonized America’s allies and shown reluctance to support Ukraine.
In Pence’s eyes, the second Trump administration has embraced a dressed-up progressivism in its openness to big government solutions and detachment from principle.
Pence, however, remains optimistic that the party can return to its conservative roots. “This nation needs a party and a movement deeply committed to American ideals and principles and all the things that have always made America strong and prosperous and free,” he said. “And I think taking that message across the country of the proven success of these principles and ideals at the heart of the American experiment is how we win this younger generation — how we win the future for conservatism.”
Pence is doing his part to win the future. In 2021, he founded Advancing American Freedom, a public policy advocacy group that aims to promote traditional conservative ideas in state and local government. Now, he has released a new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience. It articulates 16 principles that, in his view, should form the foundation of a healthy conservative movement. During his first congressional campaign in 1988, Pence read Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, which transformed his understanding of the conservative intellectual tradition. Pence hopes that his book, like Goldwater’s, will inspire young Americans to explore that tradition and appreciate its timeless wisdom.
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That may be easier said than done at a time when most young people engage with politics through short video clips and shallow online debate, where conspiracy theories abound and fringe figures harness social media to draw the impressionable toward extremism. To win the minds of rising generations, Pence said, conservatives must adapt without losing sight of first principles, carrying their ideas “with renewed energy into the debate through every artery of the new media.”
Those ideas can prevail, he continued, not simply because they are correct but because they have appealed to voters for decades. The “overwhelming majority of people that ever vote Republican,” Pence said, “still believe” in American leadership, fiscal responsibility, and traditional values. We simply need to make the case that these things work.
“I think we’ve got an age of a renewed commitment to conservative principles just around the corner,” Pence said. Recent events suggest that this may be more than false hope.
Several politicians who embodied the Republican Party’s populist shift, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, have abandoned its ranks or lost their positions. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other prominent figures of the online right have turned on Trump over his support for Israel and pursuit of war with Iran. And while Trump has diverged from the Reaganite consensus in many ways, other aspects of his second term — including his efforts to slash wasteful government programs and secure the Southern border — are consistent with the conservatism Pence hopes to revive.
Beyond mere political disagreements, the United States faces a variety of foreign and domestic challenges. At home, the family unit is in crisis as the birth rate continues to plummet, the national debt grows unattended, and patriotism is in decline. Around the world, China, Russia, and other authoritarian regimes aggressively seek to dominate the evolving global order. Pence observed that principles alone won’t solve these challenges, but they should guide the statesmanship that is urgently needed to confront them. It is incumbent on all of us, he said, to “encourage the kind of leadership that will make it possible for us to move our nation forward.”
Pence hopes that What Conservatives Believe will provide readers with the tools and motivation to do just that. But regardless of how many converts he wins to the conservative cause, he’s confident that those who are already convinced will “continue to be a voice for those values, as long as we have breath, so help us God.”
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