Former Vice President Mike Pence is back with another helping of polite backstabbing—this time in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, where he published an op-ed urging President Trump to abandon one of the most popular and effective parts of his second-term agenda: tariffs.
Yes, seriously. The same Mike Pence who rode Trump’s coattails to the White House in 2016 and then fumbled a presidential campaign so badly he dropped out before Iowa, is now lecturing the man who made the greatest political comeback in modern history. In his piece, Pence calls the tariffs a “massive policy misstep” and blames them for a sluggish economic start in 2025. Never mind that inflation is down, manufacturing is up, and border security has finally stabilized after four years of chaos under Biden.
What the 47th President Can Learn From the 45th: Time-Honored Conservative Principles Guided the First Trump Administration. America needs them now. @Mike_Pence, WSJ https://t.co/o7MCrYnULF pic.twitter.com/he21PKSXdp
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) May 2, 2025
According to Pence, “The only thing America has been liberated from is trillions of dollars in investments.” That’s quite the claim, especially considering Trump’s tariffs are wildly popular with working-class voters—the very Americans who watched their jobs shipped overseas by the same “free trade” dogma Pence is still clinging to like it’s 2003.
Pence also tried to thread the needle, praising Trump’s immigration crackdown and his expected increase in military spending, while simultaneously warning that unless Trump backs away from tariffs and re-embraces globalist trade policies, the economy is doomed. It’s the same tired song-and-dance from the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP: let’s talk tough on China, but heaven forbid we actually do anything that disrupts the donor class’s bottom line.
The irony is rich. Pence talks about “rallying the democratic world” against China through trade deals—as if we haven’t tried that for three decades. How’d that work out? China now owns half the global supply chain, the Rust Belt turned into a graveyard of shuttered factories, and American workers got sold out in exchange for cheap plastic junk and Wall Street profits.
Let’s be clear: President Trump’s tariffs aren’t a “misstep.” They’re a strategic correction—a long-overdue rebalancing of trade relationships that were rigged against American interests for far too long. The fact that Pence would use his dwindling political capital to take shots at this agenda tells you everything you need to know about why he never stood a chance in 2024.
Trump is doing what Pence never could: leading with boldness, not caution—and that’s why he’s in the White House, and Pence is writing op-eds.