Former Vice President Mike Pence said he’d hoped that former President Donald Trump would “come around” on Jan. 6, but that his actions mean he should not be elected again.
Pence made a Sunday morning appearance on Meet the Press, and was asked whether he’d be running in the 2024 presidential race if the Capitol riot had never happened.
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“I would leave that to historians to speculate on that,” Pence said. “I would tell you, at the end of the day, [Trump] did [ask me to violate my oath of office]. And I always hoped he’d come around on this.”
Pence is one of the few Republican presidential candidates to openly attack Trump, though he’s only polling at 5.3% in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
WATCH: Would fmr. VP @Mike_Pence be running for president had Trump “come around” on accepting the 2020 election results?
Pence: “I always hoped [Trump] would come around. … No one who puts himself over the Constitution should ever be president.” pic.twitter.com/wXX0izcgM5
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 18, 2023
While the former Indiana governor refused to directly address the question of whether he’d be running absent the Capitol riot, he made his thoughts on Trump clear.
“No one who puts himself over the constitution should ever be president of the United States,” he said. “And I had hoped that President Trump would eventually see that he had been misled by the so-called legal experts that had advised him, wrongly, about the role that he thought I had, and still thinks I had that day.”
Trump, who is leading the 2024 GOP primary in polling so far, maintains that he won the 2020 election.
One of the biggest policy differences Trump has with Pence and other GOP hopefuls like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is on the issue of abortion. Following the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump has embraced a more hands-off position on the issue, something Pence also touched on in his interview.
“We have other differences, other than that day,” Pence said. “It’s not just looking at the past, but it’s the direction of the country, the direction of the Republican Party in the future.”
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And that direction should include a firm pro-life stance, he argued.
“I’m pro-life, I don’t apologize for it,” Pence said, “but after leading the most pro-life administration in American history, now my former running mate has taken to calling some pro-life bills at the state level too harsh.”
