Donald Trump is a fake conservative and a traitor to the Constitution. That’s the message in a new ad from a Mike Pence–aligned super PAC, an all-out assault on the former president—and prohibitive 2024 favorite—that’s been rare among Republican contenders.
Amidst a montage of images showing Trump supporters storming the Capitol, a narrator can be heard alluding to Trump as a “weak man” who begged Pence “to ignore the Constitution” in his quest to maintain power. Hailing Pence as a “man of courage and character” who stood up to a mob that wanted him dead, the spot then accuses Trump of failing the test of leadership on that day and beyond. (In reality, Pence’s role around January 6 wasn’t completely a profile in courage.) “Since then, this so-called leader has continued to abandon our conservative principles,” the ad continues, referencing Trump’s spurning of antiabortion advocates.
The Committed to America PAC ad, which is part of a $250,000 media buy and will air in Iowa over the next two weeks, also makes allusions to the right’s raging culture war. “Now, with a woke mob trying to take away our freedom,” the narrator declares over a photo of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, “we need a president who won’t flinch, who won’t try to cut deals with our values—a president with the courage and the faith to lead us through turbulent times.”
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Bobby Saparow, the executive director of Committed to America, used the ad’s release to differentiate his PAC’s candidate from other Republicans seeking the nomination. “Mike Pence has proven he won’t back down to Trump, where is the rest of the field?” said Saparow. “This ad sets the tone for what you can expect from us. No issue will be off-limits for our operation.”
During his campaign kickoff address Wednesday, Pence made cutting comments about his old boss. “When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative, and together we did just that,” he said. “Today, he makes no such promise.” At one point Pence even attempted to decouple Trump from the broader movement. The antiabortion cause, he noted, was a staple of conservatism “long before Donald Trump was ever a part of it. Now he treats it as an inconvenience, even blaming election losses in 2022 on overturning Roe v. Wade.” In regard to Trump’s actions on January 6, meanwhile, Pence concluded that he “should never be president of the United States again.”
And yet, not long after, Pence said in a Fox News interview that he would support the Republican nominee, which could very well be Trump. Later, at a CNN town hall, Pence urged the Justice Department not to indict Trump for his handling of classified documents and didn’t rule out pardoning his former boss if he were convicted of a crime. “I don’t want to speak about hypotheticals,” Pence said regarding pardons. “I’m not sure I’m going to be elected president of the United States, but I believe we have a fighting chance.”
Of course, the odds of Pence actually besting Trump in the primary contest are very slim. A compilation of Republican primary polls puts his support at around 5% nationally, according to FiveThirtyEight, while early polling out of Iowa and New Hampshire has him in the low single digits.