Mike Pence explores a potential 2024 presidential run, citing inflation, border chaos, and foreign policy failures like Afghanistan’s withdrawal as catalysts for prayerful consideration. He defends his January 6th stance—upholding the Constitution over Trump’s crowd—and acknowledges media bias, from mocking his pre-Obergefell religious advocacy to later vindicating his #MeToo caution. Calling Trump’s presidency a "volatile but committed" partnership with landmark achievements, Pence now urges national unity, warning of $30+ trillion debt and military underfunding while framing LGBTQ+ activism and school curricula battles as a "wave of evil." His vision pivots to conservative policy with civility, leveraging Arizona’s school choice model to counter cultural divisions. [Automatically generated summary]
So I'm so happy to have today in the studio with me Charlotte Pence's father.
Charlotte works for the Daily Wire.
She's a wonderful young.
I'm sure you've had some other jobs.
Mr. Vice President, it is wonderful to have you here and author of the new book, So Help Me God.
Thank you for coming in.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew.
I'm a fan of my daughter, The Daily Wire, and I'm a fan of Andrew Clavin.
Oh, well, thank you.
That's very nice to see you.
I really am.
It's great to be with you.
Back at you.
I appreciate it very much.
So you're running for president?
I've never been asked that before.
This is the place.
This is the place where you want to make the announcement.
I could tell you something.
You know, it was about 10 years ago when I was in the Congress that I was starting to show up more on cable television.
I was in Republican leadership the last time we retired Nancy Pelosi.
And people started asking me that question back then.
And as I write in my book, I was very humbled by it.
But I always answered it the same way.
They said, you ever think about running for president?
I'd say, well, no more, no less than any other kid that grew up with a cornfield in his backyard.
I mean, that's kind of what it is to be an American.
But, you know, I can tell you we're giving it prayerful consideration.
I feel like the country's in a lot of trouble right now.
We've got inflation at a 40-year high, a crisis at our southern border.
America's place in the world, I think, has been weakened by the policies of this administration, from the disastrous withdrawal of Afghanistan to re-entering negotiations with Iran.
And so we're giving consideration about what role that we would play.
We're giving consideration to being a candidate.
And we're going to take the holidays to listen to one another as a family.
And then we're going to continue to travel around the country and listen to the American people.
I love what Ronald Reagan said once, that the American people have a funny way of letting you know if they want you to run for president.
So we've gotten a lot of encouragement over the last year and a half around the country.
We'll continue to listen and learn.
And like I always say, we'll go where we're called.
So I think it was on January 6th, it may have been January 7th, I texted Charlotte and told her that I thought, in your quiet way, I thought you would single-handedly save the Republic by refusing to do what Donald Trump had asked you to do.
But I know that a lot of people watching this show and who listened to me will never forgive you for that.
They thought you, you know, let down the side.
Can you win those people back?
I mean, if you ran for president, can you get, the left already hates you, right, just for being, just for having faith that they hate you.
They hate you for not committing adultery.
But they've always, you really get on their nerves.
But that really made the Trump, the Ever Trumpers, feel, you know, that you weren't with them.
Can you win them back?
Well, I think that would be up to every one of those Americans.
But I would say whatever the future holds for my family, I have great confidence in the people in our movement.
I remember it was the night before January 6th.
The president and I were in a private conversation in the Oval Office.
It would eventually turn into a very difficult conversation.
But in the early moments, as I captured my book, the President pointed to the crowd that had gathered already outside the window.
And he looked at me and he said, see that crowd out there?
And I said, I saw them, Mr. President.
And he said, that crowd loves us.
And I said, well, that crowd loves you.
But then I paused and I looked at him very sincerely and I said, but that crowd also loves the Constitution.
And I said, you and I both took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
And I really believe, Andrew, and will always believe in my heart of hearts that we did our duty on that day, January 6th, to uphold the oath of office I took, the oath that ended with a prayer, so help me God, that would become the title of my book.
It was a promise I said that I made to the American people, but I also made before Almighty God, and I was determined to keep that promise.
And my hope is that over time, if we feel called into public life, the people will reflect on what the Constitution says about our duties that day, and they'll at least know that in that moment we did what we believed, that we were sworn to do, that as it says in Psalm 15, that we kept our oath even when it hurts.
But I'll trust the American people and trust people in our movement.
Trump beat up on you pretty badly after that.
He said a lot of very harsh things, and yet you treat him with a great deal of respect in this book.
I was kind of taken aback by it.
You really depict him with dignity and some competence at what he's doing.
What was the experience?
What was it like?
I mean, for three years, that was a great presidency.
What was it like working with a guy like that?
Very volatile, obviously, but also intensely committed to what he was doing.
Well, let me say it always comes as a surprise when I say this, because some people think President Trump and I are a little bit different.
Look, President Trump was not just my president.
He was my friend.
We really developed a close working relationship over those four and a half years, which made the waning days of the administration that much more disappointing.
But as I try and write in the book, we had a partnership.
It was not a partnership.
There's only one president.
But we had a working relationship rather that I'll always be proud of.
We worked very closely to rebuild the military, largest investment in our national defense since the days of Ronald Reagan.
President and I worked very closely together to pass the largest tax cut and tax reform in American history.
He involved me in the interview of Supreme Court nominees in all three cases.
And we have three extraordinary new members of the Supreme Court of the United States.
And he also tasked me to travel around the country to tell our story, travel around the world to represent America.
And we had really forged the kind of relationship where when we were both at the White House every day, I probably spent four hours a day in the Oval Office.
Really?
And when neither one of us was traveling, we invariably spoke at least once a day.
And oftentimes we'd speak early and speak late.
And I'll always be proud of our record, but I'll also be proud as I try and capture in the book of a friendship and also a working relationship that I think greatly benefited the American people.
You know, your book got a wonderful review in the Wall Street Journal by one of my favorite young writers.
I think he's the best young newswriter actually in the country, a guy named Barton Swain.
And he had this very funny line about you, which I had thought myself, where he said, you have a propensity, if I could state it boldly, to be right when everybody else is wrong.
And he talks about the fact that you protected religious rights before Obergfeld came down and you were ridiculed for saying that you were careful how you met with women right before the Me Too movement came out.
And you are treated as not as badly as Trump.
Nobody is treated as badly as Trump and the press, but you're treated pretty badly.
I mean, everything you say is wrong until it turns out to be right when they just forget about it.
Have you ever confronted the press about this?
Have you ever just said to a reporter, like, you're not being fair?
Well, you know, I quote my late father, who somebody told me is actually the secret star of so help me God.
My dad was a combat veteran in Korea.
He lived the American dream.
He and my mom built a small gasoline station business in southern Indiana.
He left us before my 30th year, but he's still a big influence in my life.
But I quote dad in the book one time saying, you know, the fair is what comes to the county in July.
Life isn't fair.
I don't ever remember looking a liberal media reporter in the eye and telling him they weren't being fair.
To me, that would have been being redundant.
I remember I had a reporter ask me one time, they were flying in the back of Air Force Two, and I'd go back and chat to the reporters from time to time off the record and just, you know, make sure, particularly on foreign trips, that they were getting what they need to do their job.
And this one reporter who I thought was a little bit surprised at the penses that they encountered in person from the stereotypes that they bought into, said to me, you know, you ever feel like you ought to work to change the stereotypes about you and the criticism?
I said, you know, I think truth is a force of nature.
And I said, you know, I expect the truth about the pencils will come out.
People will someday know who we are and who we aren't.
And it was one of the reasons why writing this book was such a joy for me.
I mean, I'll never be Andrew Clavin.
I'm a big fan of your writing.
Oh, thank you.
But the ability to tell our story, growing up in a small town, in a big Irish Catholic family, walking away from faith, having no interest in faith, but then coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ when I was in college, meeting the girl of my dreams, failing at politics early, but then coming to a conclusion that my Christian faith required me to carry myself in a certain way in the public square.
So when a decade later politics came back around, we sought during our service in the Congress as governor of Indiana and as vice president to carry our way, our life, in a way that first honored God, treated others the way we wanted to be treated.
And the ability to tell that story was very humbling to me.
And the response we've gotten around the country has just been very meaningful.
I want to get back to your faith in a minute.
There's one more question, one more Trump question I want to ask you.
You just said, you just talked about your friendship with Trump and the benefit of the country.
But you also recently told Brett Baer, when I was watching, that you thought the country needed to move on.
Has he changed?
Has the situation changed?
Why do you say that now?
I think we're living in a different time.
Look, I don't think anybody could have defeated Hillary Clinton other than Donald Trump in 2016.
And I was slow to recognize that.
I endorsed another candidate in the Indiana primary, Andrew.
And in all fairness, Ted Cruz did win all three of the counties I campaigned with him in.
Donald Trump won the other 89.
But after I joined to the ticket and we developed a relationship, what I saw, the connection that he made to the American people and the sheer weight of his persona was an equal match to decades of a Clinton organization that was poised to add another eight years of liberalism on top of the left-wing policies of the Obama-Biden administration.
And I think he was the right moment at the right time.
I just think right now in the life of the nation, the American people long for us to get back to those conservative policies that people on every corner of the Daily Wire talk about and celebrate, the things that hold up our values, things that hold up free market principles and freedom and faith.
But I also, I've just been consistently hearing people come up to me and say, we'd like to get back to a politics that has the kind of respect and civility that the American people show one another on a regular basis.
Look, our politics is probably more divided today than any time in my lifetime.
But we moved back to Indiana a year and a half ago.
I shop at the Kroger.
I drive my own car.
I get gas.
I mean, I've traveled to 35 states in these midterm elections.
I'm not convinced the American people are as divided as our politics.
I mean, people of this country have figured out a long time ago how to get along with people they don't agree with.
And I think they'd like to see leadership that reflects that civility and respect, and at least leaves the possibility of solving some of these intractable problems which the corrosive nature of politics today,
the incessant attacks that our administration and the president took from before we were inaugurated, and then the president's capacity to hit back and oftentimes hit back harder doesn't create an environment where you can look for and find common ground to solve some of these intractable problems.
You know, I agree with you about the American people not being as divided.
I think there is an elite cadre of people who are terribly divided, but the actual people live together quite well, it seems to me.
They do.
American Generosity Amid Division00:05:36
And they demonstrate incredible generosity to one another in times of hardship.
I mean, I saw it again.
Karen and I not long ago made our way down to southwest Florida, which was stricken by Hurricane Ian.
It's part of the country that's meant so much to me and my family.
My kids virtually grew up on the beaches of Sanibel Island.
Charlotte could tell you that.
It's been there probably 20 times growing up.
But to see the way, you know, literally a ministry called Samaritan's Purse that we're familiar with.
They had a lot of my money, those guys.
It's a wonderful ministry.
But that great organization, when we visited there over the Thanksgiving weekend, they had already helped 7,000 families, you know, clear debris and clear their homes out and get resettled.
And they had 6,000 Americans that came from all over the country, dropped everything to go help absolute strangers, people they would never see again.
I'm telling you, this is a great country.
We just got to have government as good as our people again.
I came to Christ at the age of 49, so it was a long time.
And the difference from one day to another in joy, the uprising of joy, was astounding.
I mean, my wife turned to me like a week later and said, you're a completely changed person, utterly.
And I know, and your faith is in every page of this book.
I haven't had a chance to finish this book.
It's long, and we only knew you were coming at the last minute.
But it's in every page.
You start every chapter with a Bible verse.
It's called So Help Me God, and you talk about it, and you openly talk about it a lot and get a lot of hostility for it.
But faith is declining in this country, and church attendance is declining in this country.
And the hostility toward faith, which never existed when I was a lad at all, is now incredibly intense.
I mean, and a lot of it comes under the guise of gay rights.
But I'm an artist.
I've worked with gay people all my life, and most of them are believers in some form or another.
So it's really the activists who are doing this.
Is there a chance to turn that tide?
Is that something that you think about, or do you think it just has to, God is in charge and he'll take care of it as he will?
Well, look, the freedom of religion was our first freedom.
A casual study of the American founding.
The pilgrims understand that the people came here first and foremost to be able to live, to work, to worship according to the dictates of their conscience and their faith.
And that's why it's in the First Amendment.
And I write about it in the book, but you can skip ahead to the chapter entitled Blessed, because I think the verse at the top of that chapter is, you're blessed when people speak ill of you.
So I talk about all the times I was blessed.
But even my wife Karen, who's an amazing person, deserves more credit for all of our kids than I ever will.
Karen, when she was Second Lady of the United States, went back to the elementary Christian school that she taught art at when we were in the Congress.
When we were at the White House, she would over a day and a half a week with Secret Service and taught art at Emmanuel Christian School, but literally at one point came under fire for teaching at a Christian school that held to a biblical view of marriage.
And I remember I was on national television in the first couple of days.
You know, my brother said one time that I have the longest fuse, but the worst temper.
And what usually sets it off is things about my family.
And my Irish was all the way up on that.
And I called out several networks that were running criticisms of my wife.
And I just said that, you know, I just thought better of those networks that they would engage in that kind of religious intolerance.
And to their credit, they dropped the story quickly and understood that.
And I think that's the way forward.
The good news is we've got a Supreme Court majority now that is rock solid on religious liberty.
I mean, in the wake of the Oberfell decision approving gay marriage in the country, it would be just a few short years later that the famous cake bakers case upheld the religious liberty of a baker by a 7-2 vote, even before Amy Coney Barrett was added or every member of the court was added.
So I think we've got a real bulwark in our judiciary for religious freedom.
And I think that's exactly what the vast majority of Americans want.
I believe this is a profoundly tolerant nation and that the intolerance that comes in the name of tolerance is not emblematic of the overwhelming majority of the American people, whatever religious tradition they come from or if religion and faith is not a part of their life at all, they understand that that really goes to the heart of what it is to live in this country.
Debt, Return, and Fault Lines00:03:26
And I have great confidence that we're sorting out those fault lines in the country in ways that will allow us to move forward as a country.
I don't want to keep you forever, but I have two last questions.
One is, if you had to pick one domestic issue that you were going to run on in 2024, what would it be?
What is the thing you think is the top problem we have?
Well, I really do believe that the most underreported story today is the flatlining of military spending.
At a time when China continues to exercise more and more military aggression in the Taiwan Straits, in the South China Sea.
North Korea has returned to its provocations, firing a record number of missiles in the Asia Pacific.
Iran has continued to return to its menacing posture.
And of course, the unconscionable war of aggression launched by Russia in Ukraine that goes on at this very hour now more than ever.
We ought to return to peace through strength.
And I really believe that the reason why Russia never even tried to redraw international lines by force during our administration, which had occurred in the prior two administrations and has occurred again with the invasion of Ukraine, is in part because our administration invested in our military in record and historic ways.
And we were willing to use American military force to advance our interests in the world, whether it be striking Syria after the unconscionable use of chemical weapons against their own people, allowing our armed forces to take down the ISIS Caliphate and their leader, or taking down Qasem Salamani, the most dangerous terrorist in the world.
I think our administration, the world knew we meant business and that we were prepared to back it up.
I worry today after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that we've eroded the credibility of American strength in the world and we need to return to it.
The corollary of that though, Andrew, I will tell you, is putting our fiscal house in order.
I mean, we are literally on track with more than $30 trillion in debt.
We are on track that in a matter of a few short years, the service on our debt in the federal budget will exceed what we spend on national defense.
And I'm mindful of the fact when George Washington becomes our first president, his first objective in his first administration was to deal with debt.
Because he knew that if the United States was deeply in debt, that when England came back, not if they came back, but when they came back, which they would in 1812, that we wouldn't be able to marshal the resources to put up a defense.
I think the combination of those two things, providing for the common defense, which is the first obligation of the government, but having leadership that has the ability to bring people together to bring about the kind of changes to put us on a trajectory for a balanced budget, I think the next standard bearer for our party, I think the next president, the next administration need to take on both causes.
Empowering Parent Choice00:03:35
So my last question, like most Christians, the thing you get hit on most is your cultural ideas.
And I think like most Americans, I don't really care what people's personal lives are.
I don't want to butt into anybody's business.
But I can't help seeing this invasion of schools with pornographic material, the use of drag queens among children.
It strikes me, and the butchery of healthy young people for transgenderism.
It's a word I almost never use because I know we're all flawed, but it strikes me as a genuine wave of evil passing through the culture.
How do you respond to that?
How would you respond to that in a position of power?
We just simply, number one, I'm as troubled about every one of those developments.
I was in the state of Virginia about a week before their governor's election with an education freedom event in Loudoun County, and the gymnasium was packed, and it was parents that had literally stood up in the wake of an appalling action by a school board that there had been a transgender student who had assaulted another student in a restroom they were able to access, and they'd simply been quietly transferred to another school, endangering other students.
Look, I'm not only a proud father, which you've been nice enough to mention more than once, but we became grandparents in the last year.
Congratulations.
And we've got a couple more on the way.
And there's nothing more important in this country.
I don't care what your politics than our kids.
And I think the answer to all of these issues can actually be found in the state of Arizona.
Maybe one of the most underreported stories of conservative progress this year was that Arizona became the first state in America to enact universal school choice.
Now, every parent in Arizona can choose where their children go to school, public, private, parochial, homeschool.
There are schools literally beginning to form in places in Arizona around values.
I trust parents with their kids.
And I really do believe that so many of these issues, whether it be the critical race theory that this administration has returned to promoting in our schools, promoting in our military, or whether it be some of these appalling practices of exposing children or discussing issues that ought to only be talked about by parents.
I think all of that settles out if we simply empower parents to choose where their children go to school.
We ought to be protecting children, I believe, from what would amount in my mind.
Our foundation in Washington is going to get involved in a case in the schools in Iowa about that are attempting to allow children to go through sex change surgery and counseling without parental consent.
We need to be protecting the role of parents in the lives of their children when it comes to values and when it comes to education.
And I really do believe the school choice is the answer to that.
When I was governor of the state of Indiana, I talk about the fact in my book that we doubled what was then the largest school choice program in the country.
But I want to give credit where credit is due to Governor Doug Ducey and the legislature in Arizona.
Empowering Parental Choice00:00:56
They finally did it.
Universal school choice for every parent in the country.
There are states around the country led by Republican governors that are already now looking at that model.
And I commend it to your attention to everybody at Daily Wire because it's an idea whose time has come.
We empower parents to choose where their kids go to school.
Not all the problems go away, but a whole lot of the problems go away because parents are going to make the decision to have kids in the school that's going to give them a foundation in education, a foundation in their values, and put the interests of the kids and their families first.
That's great.
That's what real conservatism sounds like.
The book is So Help Me God by Mike Pence, a really interesting story Of your whole life, but centrally of three fascinating, four fascinating years in the White House.