Pence warns GOP against ‘populist right,’ urges return to conservative roots

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday renewed his call for the Republican Party to shed what he describes as a dangerous drift toward populism, telling CNN’s “News Central” that a rising faction within the GOP poses a direct threat to its founding conservative principles.

Speaking Wednesday on CNN’s “News Central,” Mr. Pence said many Americans — particularly those in agricultural communities — remain concerned about the economic toll of broad tariff policies and rising input costs. He said he hopes Republicans will respond by recommitting to the conservative agenda, which he argued has defined the party for the past half-century. 

“I wanted people to know around the country that a new threat to conservatism has emerged from within our movement,” Mr. Pence said on CNN. “And it’s — I call it the populist right. And essentially advances policies of protectionism, isolationism, marginalizing traditional values.”

The comments come days after Mr. Pence appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” where he framed his new book, “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience,” as a defense of the older GOP coalition built around American global leadership, limited government, free-market economics and traditional moral values. 

During that Sunday appearance, Mr. Pence said that “there’s been a rise of what I call the populist right that focuses more on what we’re against than what we’re for, focuses more on grievance than a positive conservative agenda.”

Mr. Pence offered a mixed assessment of President Trump’s second term in office, crediting the administration for securing the border, extending the Trump-Pence tax cuts, confronting Iran and standing with Israel — while faulting what he called an inconsistent posture on Ukraine and economic policies he said have no precedent in the conservative tradition.

“The idea of literally having the federal government take a percentage share of American businesses would have, I think, never even been discussed in the first Trump administration,” he said Wednesday on CNN. “Republicans have always believed in limited government in free market economics and free enterprise.”

Mr. Pence also said he does not want to see people on the populist right “conflating the president’s personal popularity with a new agenda that’s far afield from the conservative agenda,” pointing to his book as the reason he felt compelled to speak out. 

Mr. Pence cast the stakes as immediate — not only for the 2028 presidential race but for this fall’s midterm elections — signaling that the internal party fight he describes is already shaping the next generation of Republican leaders.