Former Vice President Mike Pence announced that he is not endorsing Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The announcement comes shortly after Trump sealed the GOP presidential nomination and is poised to take on President Joe Biden in November.
Pence made the announcement during an appearance on Fox News.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has declined to endorse his onetime running mate, former President Trump, in a bombshell announcement Friday.
“It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” Pence said.
“I’m incredibly proud of the record of our administration. It was a conservative record that made America more prosperous, more secure and saw conservatives appointed to our courts in a more peaceful world.”
Despite serving as Trump’s vice president, there’s been tension between the two men even prior to this year’s Republican presidential primaries. The rift started after January 6, 2021, when Trump slammed Pence for refusing to take a stronger stand in questioning the outcome of the 2020 election.
During the primary season, Pence took a number of shots at his former boss. In September 2023, he lashed out at Trump for his foreign policy positions.
During a Sunday interview, Pence discussed a wide range of topics, including House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, election integrity, and his former boss. Fox News host Howard Kurtz asked the former vice president about his previous comments about Trump, arguing that the former president “is offering…a siren song of populism, unmoored from true conservatism.”
Pence first responded by touting the Trump administration’s conservative record.
When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. For four years, we governed as Conservatives. We rebuilt our military. We stood strong on the world stage. We exercised that American leadership, we stood with our allies, stood up to our enemies. Our military took down the ISIS Caliphate. We stood with Israel as never before. We took out- You’ve got a long list. -Qasem Soleimani. Here at home, we cut taxes, we rolled back regulations, and we appointed Conservatives to our courts at every level, including three of the justices that sent Roe versus Wade to the ash heap of history. We governed as Conservatives.
The former vice president continued, noting that Trump “makes no such promise today” and accused him of “backing away from America as leader of the free world, talking the language of appeasement in the face of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe and the war raging in Ukraine.”
He repeated his criticisms a month later, claiming that Trump and some of the other Republican candidates have “embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement.”
In February, Pence announced a plan to purge the rise of “populism” within the Republican Party, which was seen as another shot at the former president and the anti-establishment faction of the GOP.
