Former vice president Mike Pence has announced that his group Advancing American Freedom will spend $20 million in an attempt to combat what he labels “unprincipled populism” within the conservative movement.
The announcement has been met with much ire from the Republican base, as Pence has been considered a traitor to former president Donald Trump’s base, largely due to his refusal to send voter certification back to the state legislatures in the controversial 2020 election.
NEW: Mike Pence announces a $20 million project to "fight GOP's drift toward populism."
Another $20 million wasted that could be spent fighting the actual bad guys next November. https://t.co/ou73gegU96
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 21, 2024
Nevertheless, in 2023, Mike Pence threw his hat in the ring to obtain the Republican nomination for president, but ultimately failed to gain voter enthusiasm and dropped out after spending millions of dollars campaigning and making appearances on conservative talk radio.
However, it is apparent he still remains determined to continue being involved in Republican politics.
As is the case with so much in politics, Pence’s statement about “unprincipled populism” is an obviously coded statement and likely an allusion to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement — of which Pence was once considered a key player.
It seems Mike Pence may have his own ideas about what conservatism is supposed to be.
Interestingly, as far as enacting policy is concerned, Donald Trump has been hailed by many as the most conservative president since Ronald Reagan. Additionally,he has been willing to do things that no president before him has dared to do, like recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and actually hold a face-to-face dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
No doubt, this bucking of established political trends has ruffled the feathers of many Washington elites who want to wear the mantle of their own idea of conservatism.
This inner-party conflict has intensified since the formation of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which could perhaps be labeled a populist movement as it sought to overthrow the entrenched elites of the Republican establishment and purge the party of politicians that only gave lip service to conservative principles.
This creates a finger-pointing game in which one group of so-called conservatives will say another group is not truly conservative but made up of “unprincipled populists.”
The Tea Party movement had considerable success in uprooting lip-service conservatives, but came up short of thoroughly purging the Republican Party. However, it could be said that the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency is perhaps the crowning achievement, if not the successor of the populist Tea Party movement.
Perhaps what Pence means to say is that this is actually a battle between populist, grass-roots conservatives and establishment conservatives with special interests.
It seems clear which one Mike Pence is.
