WASHINGTON — Mike Pence is not running for anything. He’s doing something he thinks is more important.
The former vice president is quietly building what he hopes will become the institutional backbone of a post-Trump Republican Party — a think tank expanding fast enough to need a second floor, a growing roster of conservative policy hands fleeing an ideologically adrift Heritage Foundation and a pointed argument that the GOP has lost its way on everything from tariffs to abortion to Ukraine.
“When I look at 2028, I think it’s going to be more important to focus on what we’re for before we focus on who we’re for,” Pence told MS NOW in a wide-ranging interview, a jab at his successor, JD Vance, and a signal that he considers the 2028 succession line anything but settled.
What he’s for, Pence made clear, is a return to the conservatism he believes the party has abandoned.
“I really do believe, not only, not only are these conservative principles a pathway for success for the Republican Party,” Pence said. “Over the last 50 years, they’ve resulted in a more prosperous, more secure America. I think that that’s where our movement needs to return and to revive — and, in many ways, rediscover — the conservative principles that first came to national prominence with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.”
Pence detailed the ways his party has strayed from those ideals lately — both at home and abroad.
President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs are “a profound departure” from core conservative principles that has left the economy “struggling,” he said. The isolationist strain winding its way through mainstream GOP foreign policy concerns him; he said he was “disappointed … to hear my successor recently boasting about the fact that we had ended support for Ukraine.” And he took pointed aim at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the devoutly Christian and staunchly anti-abortion Pence described as “a pro-abortion secretary” whose slow-walking of a ban on the abortion pill “has been deeply disappointing to us here, but also, I think, to millions of pro-life Americans who expect better from a Republican administration.”
But his diagnosis is not all bad.
“I couldn’t be more proud of President Trump for making the decision to unleash the armed forces of the United States against the leading state sponsor of terror in Iran,” Pence said, urging Trump “to make it clear that we intend to finish the job.”
But the overall picture, in his telling, is of a party that has drifted far from the GOP agenda and policies that defined what he called “the Trump-Pence years” — underscoring that this is not the Trump-Pence era anymore.
Which leaves the future, and his role in what comes next.
Pence’s think tank, Advancing American Freedom, has grown so quickly in recent months that it had to expand to a second floor in its downtown Washington office. The organization has attracted staffers from the Heritage Foundation, which was once the gold standard in conservative policy but has seen top talent depart in the aftermath of right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson’s interview with white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an interview some of Heritage’s top brass supported.
“The lack of separation from, you know, open anti-semitism was significant,” Pence said of Heritage’s posture. But he framed the exodus of people from one organization to the other less as a sudden break and “more of a culmination.”
“Many of the people that came our way simply spoke of having been frustrated for the last several years of not being able to advocate for those conservative principles that have defined their lives and their careers,” Pence said.
Dissent among Republicans has been notably muted in the Trump era, with a White House quick to primary or rhetorically bash any GOP lawmaker who steps out of line.
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“The president is incredibly gifted at making sure that everybody feels like they have a seat at the table, and they don’t want to lose that access,” said Marc Short, a longtime Pence aide and ally. “For candidates, there’s a great concern that this president has been willing to engage in primaries, unlike other presidents of either party. … We will see how long that lasts. I think those sorts of tendencies create more backlash when, say, you get to midterm cycle. If your approval ratings are in the 30s, you’ll see more and more candidates look to break away from that. So, it’s a strategy that has worked for him to date, but I think it’s also a strategy that’s worked in silencing many of the conservative organizations that now are sort of following policy that really isn’t conservative.”
Pence is convinced there’s a waiting audience for what he’s selling — a belief that requires holding two things at once: that Republican voters have nominated Trump in three consecutive presidential elections, and that many Republican voters are, at their core, conservatives more than MAGA loyalists.
Which is where Pence, Short and AAF step in.
In 2016, “I spoke in front of more Trump rallies than I can remember,” Pence said. “I talked about our conservative agenda. I talked about rebuilding our military, about cutting taxes and regulations, unleashing the American economy, about the right to life and traditional values. And those small crowds that I drew and the large crowds that [Trump] drew thundered in applause. I’ve never really seen a distinction between people drawn to the conservative movement and the overwhelming majority of people who identify as part of the MAGA movement. They’re all the same Americans, with some exceptions.”
That doesn’t mean Pence considers himself MAGA.
Asked if he would apply that label to himself, Pence said, “I was proud to be a part of a movement to make America great again, but I’m a conservative, and always have been a conservative.”
That distinction — subtle as it may sound — is the animating tension of everything Pence is building.
He told MS NOW he does not plan to seek office.
“We have a very deep bench in the Republican Party, lots of great talent, and I have no plans to reenter the political arena,” he said. “But I do have plans to continue to be an unwavering voice for the conservative values.”
It tees up what may amount to a Trump versus Pence proxy battle for the soul of the 2028 GOP, with Trump pushing his movement in one direction and Pence nudging it in another, neither of them on the ballot.
“I saw him, not surprisingly, not long ago, say that he was MAGA. He’ll decide what MAGA is. And to a certain extent, he’s right,” Pence said of Trump. “But I still do believe the overwhelming majority of people in our movement cherish those conservative principles, and I want to continue to be a voice for that.”
Ali Vitali is MS NOW's senior congressional correspondent and the host of "Way Too Early." She is the author of "Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet."