MANCHESTER, N.H. — Former Vice President Mike Pence forged the 2024 election as a combat for the way forward for conservatism and referred to as on fellow Republicans to reject the “siren song of populism” championed by former President Donald Trump and his followers.
“Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party we’ve long known will cease to exist and the fate of American freedom would be in doubt,” Pence mentioned in what his marketing campaign plugged as a significant speech on the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College Wednesday afternoon.
The speech comes at a essential time for Pence, whose marketing campaign has struggled to construct momentum since its launch. Four months forward of Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, Trump stays the race’s undisputed frontrunner. Pence, who served 4 years as Trump’s loyal second-in-command, has tried to color himself because the race’s most conservative candidate as he champions insurance policies which have fallen out of favor with many Republican voters.
Pence linked the proper’s populism – selling a tough concentrate on peculiar individuals’s complaints about large authorities and so-called elites – to progressivism on the left as “fellow travelers on the same road to ruin.”
“The growing faction would substitute our faith in limited government and traditional values with an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage,” he mentioned.
Pence, who broke with Trump on the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and refused to associate with his efforts to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election, continued the extra aggressive posture he has taken in current weeks. He went after the previous president repeatedly by identify.
He quipped that the Republican Party “did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015,” a reference to Trump’s marketing campaign launch in New York. He argued that the previous president has deserted the conservative ideas that he ran on when Pence was his operating mate in 2016.
“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together we did. But it’s important for Republicans to know that he and his imitators on this Republican primary make no such promise today,” Pence mentioned. “The truth is Donald Trump, along with his imitators, often sound like an echo of the progressives they seek to replace.”
Trump, responding on his Truth Social website, accused Pence of going to the “Dark Side” after solely talking properly of him for years.
“His advisers have led him down a very bad path!” Trump mentioned.
Pence accused Trump and his followers of abandoning U.S. allies overseas with isolationist insurance policies and ignoring the nationwide debt.
He additionally criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s highest-polling rival, for utilizing “the power of the state to punish a corporation for taking a political stand that he disagreed with” in his ongoing feud with Disney, one of many largest employers within the state.
Pence accused Trump and his “imitators” of making an attempt to “blatantly erode our constitutional norms,” referencing Trump’s name final 12 months for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” over his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“You know there’s already a party that embraces appeasement abroad. There’s already a party that would ignore our national debt. There’s already a party that wants to marginalize the right to life,” Pence mentioned at one level, including that that is “not conservatism. It’s Republicanism that prioritizes power over principles.”
Instead, Pence repeatedly hailed the instance of President Ronald Reagan, arguing the get together should return to his mannequin of restricted authorities, robust nationwide protection and conventional values, together with staunch opposition to abortion.
Republicans face a “time for choosing,” he mentioned, referencing a well-known Reagan speech. “The future of this movement, of this great party, belongs to one or the other – not both. That’s because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.”
The speech comes forward of the second GOP presidential debate, which will likely be held in California on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Pence has hinged a lot of his marketing campaign on doing properly in Iowa, which can maintain the Republicans’ first nominating contest subsequent January. But he has additionally spent important time campaigning throughout New Hampshire and South Carolina. Saint Anselm College has lengthy been a well-liked venue for candidates to ship main speeches.
___ Colvin reported from New York.
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