Speaking at a “SiriusXM Town Hall” at New England College on Wednesday, former Vice-President Mike Pence called for the Republican party to stop adopting populist policies and return to the kind of conservatism that former President Ronald Reagan espoused and typified the Republican Party.
“Here within the Republican Party, I think we have a choice to make, and that is whether or not we are going to offer the American people a candidate and a standard bearer that will carry forward the common sense conservative agenda of a strong national defense: American leadership in the world; fiscal responsibility and pro-growth policies; a commitment to traditional values and liberty and life, or whether or not we’ll follow the siren song of populism, unmoored to conservative principle,” Pence declared.
“Frankly, my former running mate and other candidates for the Republican nomination are beginning to move away from that conservative agenda, abandoning American leadership on the world stage, being willing to ignore the debt crisis that’s facing this future generations of Americans,” he continued.
In the eight years of the Obama presidency, the national debt increased $8.6 trillion. In the four years of the Trump presidency, the debt increased $6.7 trillion. Between President Biden’s inauguration and April 2023, the national debt has increased roughly $3.5 trillion.
“And of course, there are those who want to marginalize the cause of life to simply being a states-only issue,” Pence stated.
“But for me, all of those issues have been central to this movement,” he asserted.
Noting that he had been a Democrat when he was young, Pence noted, “It was the voice of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, it was the same common-sense principles that drew me to the Republican Party, and more importantly, haven’t just delivered victories for the GOP but they’ve actually delivered real prosperity and real security for the American people.”
“We’ve come to a Republican time for choosing, and we’re going to choose whether our party’s going to stay on that time-honored tradition of conservative principles or whether we’re going to slide in the direction of populism and be more like an echo, frankly, of the policies of the other party,” he said.