People who hate Donald Trump think Mike Pence is a suck-up. People who love Donald Trump think he’s a traitor.
Mike Pence helped make Trump president by joining his ticket in 2016. He helped make Trump not president by certifying President Joe Biden’s election in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection during which Trump’s supporters had clamored for him to “hang.” Now Pence is officially running in a fledgling and increasingly sprawling Republican primary (still) defined and dominated by the unabashed man he for so long so obsequiously served.
GOP voters in focus groups, it seems, can’t quite figure why — he’s polling somewhere generally between Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy — but the former congressperson and governor of Indiana nonetheless is launching an Iowa-focused campaign with an announcement in Des Moines. Today is his birthday. He’s turning 64.
What do people need to know about the staunch social conservative and erstwhile VP?
Here, drawn from interviews he’s done, the most revealing profiles written over the years, a pair of biographies and his recent pre-campaign memoir, is a Mike Pence brush-up.
1.
People who have spent time with him say he’s a great mimic. He does, they report, commendable impressions of George W. Bush, of Bill Clinton, of Rush Limbaugh. “There is a temptation, intentionally or unintentionally, to imitate people you respect,” he once said. “You invariably think, ‘I need to be like someone who is interesting.’”
2.
“I’ve known him for 30 years,” a former longtime neighbor told one of his biographers, “and I still don’t know him.”
3.
“People know Mike Pence,” said one of the leaders of a pro-Pence super PAC. “They just don’t know him well.”
4.
“I am a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” Pence often says.
5.
“Ambition,” in the estimation of the former Democratic minority leader of the Indiana House of Representatives, “got the best of him.”
6.
Michael Richard Pence was born in Columbus, Ind., an hour or so south of Indianapolis, on June 7, 1959 — the third of four sons and six children.
7.
He was named after his grandfather. Richard Michael Cawley was an immigrant from Ireland who became a bus driver in Chicago and taught his grandkids to recite “Humpty Dumpty” in Gaelic.
8.
His father was a veteran of the Korean War who ran a chain of gas stations. He seldom showed up to his sons’ activities. He hit them with a belt if they lied. He demanded that they stand whenever an adult entered a room. “He’d grab you if you didn’t,” Greg Pence has recalled. At the dinner table, the kids couldn’t speak. His mother was a homemaker at the time, and a self-described “Stepford wife.”
9.
He (along with his brothers) was an altar boy at St. Columba Catholic Church.
10.
From a family of Irish Catholic Democrats, one of his heroes as a boy was the nation’s first Irish Catholic president. “In my early youth,” he once told Craig Fehrman, “I was very inspired by the life of John Kennedy.” He made a JFK “memory box” with pictures and clippings. He volunteered as a youth coordinator for the Bartholomew County Democratic Party.
11.
His family called him “Bubbles” because (as Greg Pence put it) “he was chubby and funny.”
12.
At Columbus North High School he was mostly a C student and “the fourth-string center” on the football team. He showed promise, however, in public speaking, performing well in competitions put on by the local Optimist Club and the National Forensic League.
13.
At Hanover College, a small, conservative, Presbyterian school in Hanover, Indiana, he attended Catholic Mass on Sunday nights. But he also in the spring of his freshman year attended a Christian music festival in Kentucky with some evangelical friends and began a transition to having “a deep realization that what had happened on the cross in some infinitesimal way had happened for me.”
14.
He joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity — the Fijis — and was elected the president of the frat as a sophomore. Alcohol on campus was not allowed. Hanover was dry. One time an associate dean arrived to bust up a party. Pence led him straight to the keg.
15.
The fall of his senior year he voted for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan and wrote his senior thesis on “The Religious Expressions of Abraham Lincoln” — a 37-page paper biographer Tom LoBianco described as “long-winded and plodding, with a careful approach to the research but an apprehension to come to clear conclusions.”
16.
After graduation he thought about becoming a Catholic priest. He opted for law school instead. He had to take the LSAT twice to score well enough to get into Indiana University’s law school. He didn’t like it much but muddled through. “No one I know likes law school. It was a bad experience,” he said in 1994. “I wouldn’t wish it on a dog I didn’t like.”
17.
In law school, as in college, as in high school, he dabbled in cartooning. “Michael’s hilarious,” his mother once said.
18.
He met Karen Sue Batten at a Catholic church in Indianapolis in 1983. The first time he called her he hung up without saying a word. Then he called her back. She invited him over for dinner and made him a taco salad. A few days later they went ice skating at the Indianapolis fairgrounds. Nine months after they started dating, he proposed by hiding a ring in a loaf of bread, which they later shellacked. They were married in 1985 in a Catholic ceremony.
19.
They struggled to have kids, paying $10,000 for fertility treatments that were an IVF alternative approved by the Catholic church. No luck. After six years, though, they finally conceived, and they have three children — Michael Jr. (born in 1991), Charlotte (1993) and Audrey (1994).
20.
He was an unremarkable lawyer, handling mostly small-claims and family cases. In the Indianapolis legal world, wrote Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, there was a certain hierarchy, and he was not near the top. “But the great American story is that a guy like Mike Pence,” one attorney told Mayer in 2017, “is now vice president.”
21.
He started running for Congress in 1988 when he was all of 29 and lost. He ran for Congress in 1990. And lost. He campaigned partly by pedaling around the district on a single-speed bicycle. He used campaign donations to pay personal bills — $992 a month for his mortgage, $222 a month for his wife’s car, approximately $13,000 in all — a practice that wasn’t illegal at the time but still was politically unwise. He commissioned an especially odious attack ad in which an actor dressed cartoonishly as an Arab sheikh “thanked” his opponent for being a tool of foreign oil. “Pence Urges Clean Campaign, Calls Opponent a Liar,” read a headline in the Indianapolis Star. “Mike burned a lot of bridges,” Greg Pence said. “He upset a lot of his backers. It was partly because of immaturity, but he really was kind of full of shit.”
22.
He got a job in 1991 as the president of a small conservative think tank called the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, and became a board member of the anti-gay, anti-abortion Indiana Family Institute. He and some pals studied The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
23.
He wrote an essay in the Indiana Policy Review in the fall of 1991 called “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner.” It opened with a Bible verse — 1 Timothy 1:15 — “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners …” Pence wrote: “Negative campaigning, I now know, is wrong.”
24.
Through most of the 1990s in Indiana, identifying as “an evangelical Catholic,” he worked as a conservative talk radio host — referring to himself as “His Mikeness” and “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” In 1994, “The Mike Pence Show” was on 18 Emmis Communications stations, five days a week. “His political aspirations,” a former Pence radio colleague once said, “were never far behind that microphone.”
25.
He was at the time an off-air pundit, too. “Global warming is a myth,” he wrote. “Smoking doesn’t kill,” he wrote. And what now looks like a proto-DeSantis-on-Disney, he took to task the 1998 movie “Mulan,” writing: “I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan’s story will cause a quiet change in the next generation’s attitude about women in combat and they might be right.” Having women in the military, Pence concluded, was a “bad idea.”
26.
He decided to run for Congress again in 2000 on a trip to a Colorado dude ranch when he saw two red-tailed hawks soaring in the sky. “Those two birds are us,” he said to his wife. “If those two birds are us, then I think we should do it. But we should do it just like the birds … spread our wings and let God take us wherever He wants us … No flapping,” his wife said.
27.
During his campaign Pence ran on a platform that promised to oppose “any effort to recognize homosexuals as a discrete and insular minority entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws.” He also praised NAFTA. “I believe it’s about the only thing that President Clinton’s ever done that I’ve agreed with,” he said. He won with 51 percent of the vote to Democrat Bob Rock’s 38. “To understand Mike Pence,” Pence once told the Chicago Tribune, “you have to understand it took me 12 years to get to Congress.”
28.
During his six terms in the House of Representatives, he among other things wanted teachers to teach evolution not as a fact but as a theory, voted for the war in Iraq and against No Child Left Behind, advocated for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, threatened to shut down the government unless it defunded Planned Parenthood and compared the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Obamacare to the attacks on Sept. 11 (for which he quickly apologized). “He was as far right as you could go without falling off the earth,” a former Republican congressional staffer recalled.
29.
He made a speech on the floor of the House in 2003 celebrating the 25th birthday of Garfield —“not President Garfield,” he said, but the cat from the comic strip whose creator hailed from Indiana. “So I rise today,” he said, “in the midst of serious debates and serious discussions, to pay tribute to a very large, orange American tradition …”
30.
He introduced 63 bills in his 12 years in Congress. None of them became laws.
31.
Some of his fellow members called him behind his back “Mike Dense.”
32.
He thought for a while about running for president in 2012. He was for a time Charles Koch’s favorite potential candidate. At one point he gathered a handful of his most loyal donors for a dinner at Ruth’s Chris in Indianapolis. “What am I going to do?” he asked. He decided to run for governor. Some people were disappointed. “I was crestfallen,” said Kellyanne Conway, a pollster who later would become a campaign manager and top aide to Trump but then was pushing Pence to run. “I’m not much of a crier — but I was very sad about it, and not mad, just sad, because I thought it was a huge missed opportunity.”
33.
He became governor by winning 49.6 percent of the vote, becoming the first governor in Indiana history to win with less than 50 percent.
34.
As governor, he signed laws restricting abortions and allowing guns in parking lots of schools, dragged his feet during an HIV outbreak in the rural part of the state, deleted comments from his official Facebook page disagreeing with his views on gay marriage (and then apologized for it) and put together plans for a state-run news service he was going to call “Just IN” (which he scrapped due to criticism, including the Atlantic dubbing the idea “Pravda on the Plains”). But more than anything else, his tenure was marked by the furor surrounding the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill that made it essentially legal for businesses in the state to discriminate against gay people. Battered by backlash from corporations, the NCAA and even the GOP establishment, then mocked for a disastrous appearance on TV, he backed off and signed into law a watered-down version of the bill. Liberals saw him as a bigot. Conservatives thought he had caved. His polling plunged. People thought he was done. “I bet he’d never get elected again in Indiana,” the owner of the Indianapolis Business Journal said in 2017. “But he went from being a likely loser as an incumbent governor to vice president of the United States.”
35.
He has throughout his political career relied heavily on his wife. On his desk in the governor’s office was an antique red phone — Karen Pence’s direct line. “When that phone rings, everything stops,” a state GOP spokesperson once said. She had a workspace across the statehouse from the atrium from her husband’s office — the first first lady of Indiana to have such a setup. She’s been called his “prayer warrior” and his “gut check and shield.”
36.
He calls her “Mother.”
37.
He adheres to the so-called “Billy Graham rule” — no dining, no drinking and no meeting alone with women other than his wife.
38.
In 2016, ahead of the Indiana GOP presidential primary, he endorsed Ted Cruz over Trump — somewhat tepidly, though, going out of his way to “commend” Trump, too. “Ted Cruz won all three counties that I campaigned for him,” he once deadpanned to POLITICO. “And Trump won the other 89.”
39.
That spring, heading into the primary in his state, he scrawled a note to himself on a napkin: I’m tired of politics, I just want me back.
40.
Shortly thereafter, he was picked (over Chris Christie) to be Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. And he threw himself into campaigning and came around to defending Trump even after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, speaking frequently of Trump’s “broad shoulders.” The campaign grew to count on him for frequently needed clean-up efforts. “He was our top surrogate by far,” a former senior adviser to Trump told McKay Coppins. “He was this mild-mannered, uber-Christian guy with a Midwestern accent telling voters, ‘Trump is a good man; I know what’s in his heart.’ It was very convincing — you wanted to trust him. You’d be sitting there listening to him thinking, Yeah, maybe Trump is a good man!”
41.
He got booed at “Hamilton.”
42.
As vice president, he copied Trump, he defended Trump, and he praised Trump (in one Cabinet meeting, once every 12 seconds for three minutes straight). He wrote an op-ed in June of 2020 saying there was no Covid second wave. “He’s the most publicly deferential to his president of any VP I can remember,” said Mark Knoller, a longtime White House correspondent for CBS News — “mustering a devotional gaze,” as Jane Mayer put it, “rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan.” An expert and historian of the vice presidency took to calling him the “Sycophant-in-Chief."
“If you need a friend in Washington, one longtime friend and former senior Pence adviser told POLITICO, “don’t get yourself a dog. Get yourself a Mike Pence.”
“So, in the deal with Trump, I felt like I was watching Mike sell his soul on the global stage, certainly on the national stage, and I thought, as a pastor, ‘This will take a very long time to repair — in his own soul, in his interior world,” said Robert Schenck, an evangelical pastor who had prayed with Pence when he was in Congress but later broke with the Christian right largely because of Trump. “If he could spend enough time in his interior world, I think Mike could find a conscience.”
43.
At 3:40 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2021, he formally declared Joe Biden the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. “Mike Pence,” said Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell, “could not go to a Trump rally and be safe.”
44.
He said he was “infuriated” by what he saw on Jan. 6. While he refused to testify in front of the Jan. 6 committee — “Congress has no right to my testimony,” he said — he did testify before the grand jury investigating the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
45.
He also campaigned in the 2022 cycle for at least 10 candidates who questioned the legitimacy of that election.
46.
The name of his memoir is So Help Me God.
47.
He moved in 2021 to Carmel, Indiana, into a $1.93-million mansion with an indoor basketball court and a bar stocked with O’Doul’s. “I’m pretty attached to pizza and O’Doul’s on Friday night,” he once told POLITICO.
48.
He doesn’t drink, sticking to Coke or coffee with Splenda.
49.
He loves chain restaurants and “dad rock” — the Eagles, Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn. “He likes,” in the words of Tom Rose, a conservative radio host and longtime friend, “what his people like.”
50.
His favorite books are the Bible and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.
51.
His favorite movie is “The Wizard of Oz.”
52.
He had over the fireplace at the vice president’s residence in Washington a plaque with a passage from the Bible: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
53.
“Mike Pence wanted to be president practically since he popped out of the womb,” the editor of his hometown newspaper once said.
54.
“If you’re Mike Pence, and you believe what he believes, you know God has a plan,” the evangelical power broker Ralph Reed once told McKay Coppins.
55.
“It’s in the Lord’s hands,” Pence told POLITICO last year.
Sources: POLLITICO, POLITICO Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, the Indianapolis Business Journal, the Indianapolis Star, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Intercept, USA Today, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, New York, the New Yorker, Vox, NPR, CBN, CNN, ABC, CBS, congress.gov, govtrack.us, Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House, by Tom LoBianco; The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, by Michael D’Antonio and Peter Eisner; So Help Me God, by Mike Pence.
