During Sunday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “MediaBuzz,” former VP Mike Pence, who is fighting for the Republican presidential nomination next year, voiced his critique of his former boss on foreign policy.
Partial transcript as follows:
KURTZ: Here’s what I don’t get. You’re constantly praising the four-year conservative record of the Trump-Pence administration.
PENCE: Yes. Right.
KURTZ: Now you turn around and say that you’re the real conservative in the race and that Donald Trump is offering, and this is a quote, a siren song of populism unmoored from true conservatism. How is that possible? Did he morph into something else?
PENCE: When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. For four years we governed as conservatives. We rebuilt our military. We stood strong on the world stage. We exercised American leadership. We stood with our allies, and stood up to our enemies. Our military took down the ISIS caliphate. We stood with Israel as never before. We took down —
KURTZ: Not a long list?
PENCE: — Qasem Soleimani. Here at home, we cut taxes, we rolled back regulations, and we appointed conservatives to our courts at every level, including three