Mike Pence Puts The GOP On Notice

Mike Pence Puts The GOP On Notice - Page 5

Mike Pence isn't just defending his conservative bona fides — he's warning that the populist wing of his own party is drifting somewhere dangerous

Pence criticizes GOP populists for drift toward 'big government, isolationist, protectionist' politics.
Pence defends traditional conservatism and warns against anti-Semitism entering the party.
Pence supports standing up to China but opposes broad tariffs, sees Ukraine as a test of GOP's direction.

RICE PENCE — Source: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers / Getty

Mike Pence Puts The GOP On Notice

Mike Pence isn’t just defending his conservative bona fides — he’s warning that the populist wing of his own party is drifting somewhere dangerous. The retreat from American leadership abroad, the former vice president told Tony Katz, “drifts quickly into anti-Semitic rhetoric,” a poison he says has jumped from the progressive left onto the populist right. Translation: this isn’t just a book-tour talking point, it’s an accusation.

Pence joined Katz to promote his new book, “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience,” but the conversation quickly turned into a real argument over what the Republican Party even stands for anymore. Katz opened by drawing the line himself: he’s a conservative, not a populist, and he made clear he doesn’t buy that conservatism has become “passe” inside a MAGA-dominated GOP.

Pence didn’t dodge the tension. He credited the Trump administration for standing up to Iran, backing Israel, extending the 2017 tax cuts, and unleashing American energy — real wins, in his telling. But then came the turn: he said “voices and forces” inside the party now want to push the GOP toward “big government, isolationist, protectionist” politics that have nothing to do with the conservatism he spent decades defending.

On trade, Pence didn’t flinch when Katz pushed him on China’s currency manipulation and NATO freeloading — he agreed China is a legitimate target, noting the $250 billion in tariffs still standing from his own administration. But he drew a hard line at broad tariffs on allies, calling the administration’s “liberation day” tariffs against friend and foe alike “essentially the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.” He said he was relieved the Supreme Court knocked it back — even as new tariff proposals keep surfacing.

Katz pressed him on the “neocon” label critics love to slap on him. Pence’s answer was blunt: labels don’t matter much anymore, but principle does. Go to war to win, achieve the objective, get out — no forever wars, but no retreat either. He pointed to the stop-and-start support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion as proof the isolationist instinct is already reshaping GOP policy in real time.

That instinct, Pence argued, doesn’t stay contained to foreign policy. It’s the same drift that lets anti-Israel sentiment curdle into anti-Semitism — a trend he said has “no place in America,” full stop.

Bottom line: Pence isn’t conceding that populism and conservatism are the same movement wearing different hats. He’s arguing one is quietly replacing the other — and the debt, Israel, and Ukraine are just where it shows up first.