Mike Pence couldn’t have found a more welcoming audience. The former vice president to President Donald J. Trump delivered a forceful statement of support for Israel at a largely conservative Jewish leader’s conference in midtown Manhattan, drawing repeated applause for nearly 30 minutes.
When the questioner, Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein, asked Pence, an evangelical Christian, to lead a prayer at the venue for the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, Pence wasted no time in saying, “That would be a great honor. Let’s pray.”
His prayer elicited applause and shouts of “Amen.”
Seven months after dropping out of the Republican presidential race after inevitable losses in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Pence has sought out friendly audiences as he tries to rehabilitate his political career. But just as importantly, he is presenting himself as a guardian of the conservative traditions of the Republican Party he grew up in and has since been redefined by Trump.
For one thing, he has begun appearing in high-profile television interviews to criticize Trump’s stance on abortion, and he has announced that his political advocacy group will spend $20 million this year on appearances and ads promoting at-risk conservative positions on issues such as tariffs, government spending and the U.S.’s role in the world.
Pence is the most prominent Republican in the country to have said he would not vote for Trump, who elected him to the White House as governor of Indiana, and has made clear that, now that he is 65, he remains open to a second presidential run.
“The role I want to play is to be a champion for the broad, mainstream conservative agenda that has defined the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan,” he said in an interview before attending the conference. “There’s some evidence that some voices, both inside and outside the party, are moving away from that agenda. I want my voice, my organization, to be the anchor upwind.”
Still, Pence is clearly out of step with the party that once supported him: To many Trump supporters, he is still the vice president who fell in line with Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, and refused to stay in power.
“Judas Pence is the man who is dying with MAGA, even though he’s putting 30 silver coins into the PAC,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a leader of Mr. Trump’s movement, referring to Mr. Pence’s advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom. (Mr. Pence made the remarks in a text message hours before a federal judge sentenced him to four months in prison and ordered him to turn himself in by July 1 for failing to comply with a subpoena from a House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.)
“I think that’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen to me,” Pence said. “I think that’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen to me. I think that’s going to happen to me. I think that’s the kind of thing …
“I hope not,” he said. “I hope I’m on the continent. I’ve been there ever since I joined the Republican Party.”
“When I was running for president, people would often say, ‘The problem with Mike Pence is he’s running for a Republican Party that doesn’t exist anymore,'” Pence said. “But that hasn’t been my experience. Everywhere I’ve campaigned, whether they were supporting the former president or someone else, people have almost universally said, ‘I appreciate what you stand for,’ and I remain convinced that this is still a conservative party.”
But there are plenty of signs that Pence is isolated. He said he hasn’t spoken to Trump “in a long time.” Republicans say he’s unlikely to be given a prominent speaking spot at their convention in Milwaukee in July. A YouGov/Economist poll in March found that 52% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Pence, compared with 42% who have a favorable view of the former vice president.
Pence, who recounted the welcome he received during his presidential campaign despite his favorable position as a former vice president and whose approval ratings never got above single digits in most early polls, was forced to drop out of the race before even reaching Iowa.
The notion of a former vice president not supporting the president he served is unusual, and President Biden brought it up in a dry joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year.
In contrast, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who both ran for the Republican presidential nomination despite receiving far more support, said they would vote for Trump. Pence said he would not vote for Biden, but did not say who he would support.
“I like Mike a lot, and I strongly recommended him for Trump in 2016,” said Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. But he added, “Mike Pence is in a different party now and appeals to a different base than he did two years ago. Unfortunately for Mike, that tends to put him in a bind. On his current trajectory, he’s going to shrink to a Never-Trump vote.”
“There is no anti-Trump future in the Republican Party,” Gingrich said.
Pence has spent the past few months trying to highlight and criticize someone as hugely popular as Trump within his party, while his former allies have tried to push him out of the spotlight.
In the interview, Pence denounced Trump’s 34 felony conviction for falsifying business records to hide $130,000 in hush money payments to a porn star. “I’m hopeful that his felony conviction will be overturned. This case should never have been brought,” he said.
But at the Jerusalem Post forum, he said little about Trump other than to relate himself to Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that is as popular here as Trump himself.
Pence argued that Trump is the one who has moved away from traditional Republican positions over the past four years.
“On every issue, the president is running on a platform that’s different than what we’ve had in the past,” Pence said. “He seems to be aligned with isolationist voices in our party, or on the national debt, he hasn’t even tried to reform entitlements, which account for 85 percent of federal spending.”
Pence has been a fierce critic of Trump, particularly on the issue of abortion. While he and many other conservatives have pushed for a national ban on abortion, Trump has called for leaving regulation up to the states, a stance that has won Pence some supporters in a key corner of the Republican coalition.
“He’s been a steady steward of the pro-life movement among Republican leaders,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion rights group. “He’s been consistent. He’s not one to waver.”
Dannenfelser, who leads a group supporting Trump in November, said Pence would likely find strong support from anti-abortion advocates if he decided to return to politics in a post-Trump world.
“There has to be a real test in the coming presidential election,” she said, “and he’s going to be an important and essential part of that test.”
Tim Chapman, a senior adviser to Pence’s advocacy group, said the former vice president saw himself as “a keeper of the flame at a time of great turmoil on the right.”
“Everybody’s playing a game of showing how close they are to Trump,” Chapman said. “We don’t have to fake it. Everybody knows where we are. We’re liberated in a way that no other group is.”
Pence has been traveling the country giving speeches and interviews, raising funds and pitching himself as a future candidate for national office — “I’ll keep you posted” when asked if he’d try again for the White House — but his next chapter seems bleak, at least until November.
Pence will be facing off against the most powerful man in the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, and at this point, there seems little room for a candidate like him in Trump’s world.
“He’s done,” Mr. Bannon said, “but like any politician, he’s obsessed with having influence in the public eye.”
