www.cnn.com – 2023-06-08 05:23:00
CNN
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Former Vice President Mike Pence staked out a series of clear differences with boss-turned-2024 rival Donald Trump, and needled other Republican contenders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a CNN town hall in Iowa on Wednesday night.
Hours after he launched his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Pence broke with the former president on immigration policy, entitlement spending, US support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and more.
He said he would not reinstate the policy of separating migrant families at the border – a widely criticized practice that Trump didn’t rule out reviving in his own CNN town hall last month.
Pence also said that other Republican rivals were wrong to put changes to Social Security off the table, telling the crowd at Grand View University in Des Moines that seriously reducing federal spending will require changes to entitlement programs.
He sharply rebuked Trump for describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “genius” for his invasion of Ukraine, while casting DeSantis as naive on the issue. And he continued to criticize the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pence said he and Trump don’t just disagree about the past; the two have “a different vision for our party.”
“I’m somebody who believes in American leadership in the world. Our party needs to lead on fiscal responsibility and stand without apology for life. We’ll have those debates,” he said.
Still, Pence said, he will “support the Republican nominee in 2024,” a pledge he said he felt comfortable making because he doubted Trump would win the primary.
“Different times call for different leadership,” Pence said. “The American people don’t look backwards; they look forward. … I don’t think my old running mate is going to be the Republican nominee for president.”
Here are six takeaways from Pence’s CNN town hall:
Pence urged the Justice Department not to indict his onetime boss, saying such an indictment would fuel division inside the country and “send a terrible message to the wider world.”
While Pence said that “no one is above the law,” he said the DOJ could resolve its investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of classified documents without resorting to an indictment, just as the department informed Pence’s attorney last week that there would be no charges brought in the case of the classified documents discovered in his home.
But in Pence’s case, the former vice president immediately contacted the National Archives and the FBI to return his documents, while Trump resisted handing over his classified material and failed to return all classified documents after receiving a subpoena last May.
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