The 48th Vice President of the United States Mike Pence offered a hopeful, optimistic view of today’s hyper-partisan political landscape on Wednesday morning, insisting that Americans are less divided than they appear and remain “the most resilient, most innovative, most patriotic, and most generous people the world has ever known.”
“We just need government as good as our people again, and I believe we’ll have it and have it soon,” he told Fox 2 Detroit’s Roop Raj during a keynote conversation in the Grand Hotel Theatre to kick off the second day of the 2026 Mackinac Policy Conference.
He praised the Detroit Regional Chamber for this year’s theme, “A Quest for Common Ground,” because finding it is “necessary to forge the solutions to the challenges facing this generation and the next.”
Pence provided a litany of alarming problems and crises, from the war in Iran and “authoritarian regimes on the move in Eastern Europe and the Asian Pacific” to the rising cost of living and “a $39 trillion national debt larger than the entire national economy.”
“Now more than ever, we need the demand of our leaders of politics to allow us to address these issues, listen to one another, in the way that Americans have always done in times of great trial,” Pence said. “I think our politics are more divided than any time since I had dark hair, but just not convinced the American people are as divided as our politics.”
In the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, President Donald Trump asked Pence, whom he had put in charge of the federal government response, why they hadn’t turned to the Defense Production Act to force American factories to pivot to make ventilators, personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer, and other supplies.
“I turned to him, and I said, ‘Because nobody said no,’” Pence recalled. “He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked at me, and he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, since the outset of this crisis, every company we have called, including our great automotive companies, … dropped whatever they were doing and said, ‘How can we help? How can we serve our country?’ And nobody ever asked how they were going to be paid.”
Pence said as both Vice President and Indiana governor, he saw time and again how Americans stepped up for one another regardless of partisanship in times of need.
“I always tell people when a natural disaster happens – whether it be Michigan, Indiana, or anywhere in America — the next day, the only thing you can’t find in those neighborhoods is a parking spot,” he said. “The American people come from everywhere to help people they’ve never met and will never see again put their lives back together.”
Since his “involuntary retirement” when the Trump-Pence ticket lost in 2020, Pence has formed the Washington D.C. think tank Advancing American Freedom to be the consistent voice for traditional conservatism. He’s also out next week with a new book, “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience.”
All of that is meant to provide a contrast to the Republicanism of Trump, which he bemoaned as an ideological mélange of feuding with allies, hindering free trade with across-the-board tariffs, threats to nationalize corporations, and more.
“The thing we know here in Michigan, the thing we know in Indiana, is that trade means jobs,” Pence said. “I’m all about requiring that our trading partners deal with us fairly and openly, but I think we ought to pursue free trade with free nations around the world [and] be as tough as we can on China until they open their markets and start to respect the international rules of the road.”
He’s also disappointed in the Trump administration’s disinterest in taming the $39 trillion national debt. “The only common ground bipartisan consensus in Washington D.C. today is that we apparently are going to do absolutely nothing to confront the national debt,” he said.
His personal relationship with Trump became notoriously strained when he refused to block the Senate’s certification of their election loss in 2021. Still, he supports the Trump agenda of tax cuts, immigration enforcement, and the invasion of Iran.
“I’m incredibly proud of the way the President of the United States has taken the fight directly to the mullahs in Tehran, unleashed the armed forces of the United States last year and this year, and how he has stood without apology for our most cherished ally, Israel,” Pence said.
Asked by Raj if he was disappointed in former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s decision to drop his independent bid for Michigan governor, Pence defended the two-party system. Duggan’s argument had been that civility would come if the two sides weren’t so bitterly competitive and attempted to compromise for solutions.
Pence said that he agreed with the sentiment but feels Duggan’s approach is not likely to ever succeed.
“With the progressive left being so dominant in the Democratic Party [and] voices on the populist right in the Republican Party advocating the government solutions, protectionism, some cases isolationism, we see people being alienated from both political parties,” Pence said. But “we’re a two-party system, and that’s a reality to me, and I say this with deepest respect to him or any others. I think the antidote is not to leave the two-party system, is to redeem the two-party system, is to stand up and to make stands, and to take that case to the American people.”
This session was sponsored by the University of Michigan.
