“It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” said Mike Pence, who served as the former president’s vice president and ran alongside him in 2020.
Pence said during an interview with Martha MacCallum of FOX News that he is proud of the Trump administration’s record. However, he said his differences with Trump are too wide for him to support his former running mate’s current campaign.
“During my presidential campaign I made it clear that there are profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues – and not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised on January the 6th,” said Pence.
He kicked off his own campaign – reports said he wanted to run as a “Reagan Republican” – last June but suspended it in October. Trump managed to get all the delegates he needs to be the GOP candidate in 2024 this week, but he still faces a mountain of legal issues before the November election – and they are getting expensive.
At the end of the 2020 campaign, Trump’s unfounded claims about voter fraud increased, and he pressured Pence not to certify votes for current President Joe Biden. Pence didn’t go along with the plan (and wouldn’t have been able to do so), and the crowd of rioters gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 called for him to he hanged.
Even before Trump announced his campaign, he denounced the idea of running alongside Pence again.
“I don’t think the people would accept it,” Trump told the Washington Examiner during an interview from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
This year, the former vice president said that he has new concerns about Trump. These include the candidate’s stance on the national debt, a softening of Trump’s “commitment to the sanctity of human life” and “his reversal of getting tough on China” by not supporting a potential ban on TikTok in the U.S.
Pence said that Trump’s agenda is “at odds with the conservative agenda.”
He told MacCallum that he would “never vote for Joe Biden,” but avoided answering whether he would vote for a third-party candidate. As for running as a third-party candidate, Pence assured the host that he’s still a Republican.