Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is going to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick according to multiple news outlets, although the Trump campaign has pushed back against the notion that the selection has been made. Pence would not be a crazy pick prone to saying crazy, off-the-cuff things like the man at the top of the ticket. He’s not a Sarah Palin. He’s not even a Newt Gingrich.
Because he’s such a conventional apparent choice, though, that means he’s taken a lot of conventional conservative positions. Those positions have often contrasted with Trump’s less conventional, occasionally bat guano insane ones. Here is a brief list of some of those areas of explicit and presumed disagreement between Donald Trump’s crackpot ideas and Pence’s less so views.
- As noted in an earlier post, Pence accurately described Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from immigrating to this country as “offensive and unconstitutional.”
- When Trump said that there had to be “some form of punishment” for women who have an abortion—a statement he eventually backtracked from and defended in fantastically ludicrous fashion—Pence’s office released a statement saying “Governor Pence does not agree with the statement made by Donald Trump.”
- When Donald Trump accused federal judge and Indianan Gonzalo Curiel of being biased against him because “he’s a Mexican,” Pence thought otherwise. “Every American is entitled to a fair trial and an impartial judge, but of course I think those comments were inappropriate,” he said.
- Earlier this month, Donald Trump praised Saddam Hussein: “He was a bad guy—really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. Over.” Pence, who said the following about Hussein in 2006, would presumably disagree: “Saddam Hussein was a nightmare for the Iraqi people and his execution marks the end of an era when violence against innocent men, women and children was a means to wealth and power.”
- When campaigning in Indiana earlier this year, Donald Trump said this about trade policy: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country.” A few weeks earlier, Mike Pence proudly boasted of leading a “jobs mission” to China, Indiana’s “[fifth] largest export partner.”
- Similarly, Trump used the word rape to describe Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal last month. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country,” he said. “That’s what it is, too. It’s a harsh word: It’s a rape of our country.” Of TPP, Pence said in 2014: “Trade means jobs, but trade also means security. The time has come for all of us to urge the swift adoption of the Trans Pacific Partnership”.
- For years, Donald Trump peddled the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is foreign born and thus not eligible to be president. He famously sent a team of investigators to Hawaii in 2011 to try to prove that Obama was born in Kenya. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” Trump said at the time. In 2009, Pence said this: “On that issue, I’m pretty distinctive that the president is from Hawaii.”
There is one area of relative Trump saneness on which Mike Pence strongly disagrees: Donald has been the most LGBT-friendly main ticket Republican candidate possibly ever. Pence, on the other hand, not so much.
Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.
