May 31, 2026 / 12:41 PM EDT
/ CBS News
Add CBS News on Google
The following is the transcript of the interview with former Vice President Mike Pence that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on May 31, 2026.MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face the Nation. We are joined now by former Vice President Mike Pence, who has a new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience. Good morning to you, Mr. Vice President.MIKE PENCE: Good morning, Margaret. Good to see you.MARGARET BRENNAN: You clearly think your party needs some reminders here, and you write that Americans are confused about what it means to be a conservative. You say for many right-wing populists, grievance dictates policy. Who or what are you thinking about there?MIKE PENCE: Well, I think, look, from all of my adult life, the Republican Party has been defined by a commitment to a conservative agenda to America as leader of the free world, to limited government, free market, economics, and traditional moral values, especially the right to life. And I'm proud to say that from the Reagan administration to the first Trump administration, we governed on that agenda, but I wrote "What Conservatives Believe," because just in the last four or five years, 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. I mean the conservative movement has always been battling politically with the progressive left, but now there's a new threat from the populist right that would embrace policies of isolationism abroad, that would embrace big government and protectionism at home, marginalize the right to life, and as we go into this fall's elections and go into 2028 I thought it was important that we take a moment as a party and as a movement to remind ourselves what we believe. MARGARET BRENNAN: But some of what you are describing isn't just on the fringes or within the party, it's the President of the United States who's leader of that party, and you write he has not always governed as a conservative, I understand that the president's overall approval rating is low. It is. But he still seems to have this vice grip on the neck of the Republican party right now. So, how can you revive a portion of it that he is in opposition to? I mean, right to life was one of them, as you just detailed. You split with him very publicly on that. You think he betrayed it. You think he betrayed on, for example, spending and the way he's dealing with some of the free market issues.MIKE PENCE: Well, look, I think the second Trump administration has got a lot right. They got the border secured after the worst border crisis in American history. They extended those Trump-Pence tax cuts that we passed in their entirety. They've stood without apology for our cherished ally, Israel, and took the fight directly to Iran. But on other instances, you've seen the impact and the embrace by the President and people around him of the politics of the populist right, the price controls on credit cards and pharmaceuticals, nationalization of American businesses, of course, broad-based tariffs on friend and foe alike, add to that marginalizing the right to life, doing nothing about the broad distribution of the abortion pill by mail that Joe Biden's administration made possible, and then the stops and starts on Ukraine, while they've been strong on Israel, strong with Iran. The stops and starts reflect more the politics of the progressive left and appeasement than that time-honored conservative agenda that's defined our party at home and abroad.
