2 possible 2024 presidential candidates, Trump and Pence, gave speeches in Washington

VPM | By Tamara Keith

Published July 27, 2022 at 9:09 PM EDT

Updated March 16, 2023

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Two potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates came to Washington this week to make their cases – one, the former president who sparked an insurrection trying to cling to power – the other, the former vice president who refused to go along with the plot. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.

TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Donald Trump made his first trip to Washington since refusing to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration to deliver a policy speech about crime. And for 50 or so minutes, he largely stuck to the teleprompter, painting a dystopian image of America.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: Our streets are riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims.

KEITH: Trump was speaking at a conference of the America First Policy Institute, a group run by former Trump administration officials. Trump called for finishing the border wall, moving the homeless to tent encampments on the outskirts of major cities and executing convicted drug traffickers. But even that was all rather low energy until he went off script and veered to the one thing that truly animates Trump and his hardcore supporters.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TRUMP: I always say, I ran the first time, and I won. Then I ran a second time, and I did much better. We got millions and millions more votes. And you know what? That’s going to be a story for a long time. What a disgrace it was. But we may just have to do it again. We have to straighten out our country.

(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)

KEITH: Trump did get more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but Joe Biden got even more. Nearly two years later, Trump still hasn’t publicly admitted he lost. In his remarks, Trump never said the name Mike Pence, the vice president who became a target of his attacks on January 6, who hid with his family in security detail in the Capitol as rioters searching for him chanted hang Mike Pence. And Pence, in his own policy speech in a different Washington, D.C., hotel ballroom, only said Trump’s name when referring to the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration. His criticisms, if you can call them that, were indirect.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MIKE PENCE: Now, some people may choose to focus on the past, but elections are about the future. And I believe conservatives must focus on the future to win back America.

(APPLAUSE)

KEITH: He unfurled what he called his freedom agenda – a pretty standard list of conservative policy goals. When pressed on the divide between him and Trump, Pence deflected.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PENCE: I don’t know that our movement is that divided. I don’t know that the president and I differ on issues. But we may differ on focus.

KEITH: Sarah Longwell, a Republican political consultant, has been hosting a series of focus groups with Trump voters. She says they don’t want to talk about the January 6 investigations and, by extension, the 2020 election.

SARAH LONGWELL: Because the 2020 election being stolen is starting to become something that’s just a little bit boring to them.

KEITH: Longwell, who opposed Trump in 2020, says she hears more and more ambivalence from voters about another Trump run.

LONGWELL: One of the things that I’m hearing from these voters, in addition to expressing concerns about Trump’s electability, is that there’s also a lot of new people that they’re very interested in. You know, they’re extremely enthusiastic about Ron DeSantis.

KEITH: The Florida governor. And although Pence is making all the moves of a man who plans to run for president – traveling to early voting states, preparing to release a book – Longwell says he’s a politician without a natural constituency. Trump true believers see him as a traitor. And…

LONGWELL: Mike Pence is just seen as kind of the boring old establishment that the Republican base has long moved on from.

KEITH: On the pro-Trump streaming network Right Side Broadcasting, one of the hosts asked Brooke Rollins, who heads the America First Policy Institute, whether all the proposals they’re developing would make a second Trump term more productive. The easy answer would have been yes, but that isn’t what Rollins said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BROOKE ROLLINS: I think whether it’s Donald Trump or any other number of great Americans, whomever it ends up being in the next White House on our side, we’re going to be ready.

KEITH: Whomever it ends up being. Tamara Keith, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. In that time, she has chronicled the final years of the Obama administration, covered Hillary Clinton's failed bid for president from start to finish and thrown herself into documenting the Trump administration, from policy made by tweet to the president's COVID diagnosis and the insurrection. In the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration, she focused her reporting on the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents' Association and is the association's president through July 15, 2023. In that role she leads the press corps in its interactions with the White House, advocating for press conferences and coordinating travel. Her mission for the year of her presidency is to demystify the White House beat for the public, in an effort to help restore trust in the press, an essential pillar of American democracy.

Previously Keith covered congress for NPR with an emphasis on House Republicans, the budget, taxes and the fiscal fights that dominated at the time.

Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world, from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake, and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived of and reported "The Road Back To Work," a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.

Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member station KQED's California Report, where she covered agriculture, the environment, economic issues and state politics. She covered the 2004 presidential election for NPR Member station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and opened the state capital bureau for NPR Member station KPCC to cover then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited and distributed for nine years, back before podcasts were cool.

Keith earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Keith is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game. She serves on advisory boards for the University of California Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and the UC Berkeley J-School.

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