Mike Pence drops out of presidential race at Republican Jewish conference

LAS VEGAS — Mike Pence chose a Jewish gathering to announce his exit from the presidential race, with a veiled warning that his onetime boss, Donald Trump, posed a threat to a robust American foreign policy that he said was vital to Israel’s interests.

“It’s become clear to me: This is not my time,” Pence said at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gathering in Las Vegas. “So after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today.”

Pence, the former vice president, elicited gasps and cries of “We love you!” during his address.

“We always knew this would be an uphill battle, but I have no regrets,” Pence went on to tell the friendly audience, which reacted with audible surprise to the announcement and gave him multiple standing ovations.

Pence is the first major candidate to leave a race that has been dominated by his former boss-turned-rival, Trump, and his struggles underscore just how much the former president has transformed the party. A former vice president would typically be seen as a formidable challenger in any primary, but Pence has struggled to find a base of support.

Pence’s decision, more than two months before the Iowa caucuses that he had staked his campaign on, saves him from accumulating additional debt, as well as the embarrassment of potentially failing to qualify for the third Republican primary debate, on Nov. 8 in Miami.

Pence could not bring himself to mention the name of Trump, who spoke at the event later Saturday and who is far and away the favorite to win the nomination. Pence even avoided namechecking the former president while reviewing the record of what he called the most “pro-Israel administration” in American history.

But after delivering the expected exhortation to remove US President Joe Biden, Pence made clear that he did not want Trump to retake the office, framing his concerns in the context of Israel’s war with Hamas.

“Will Republicans continue to be the party of the traditional conservatives that has defined our movement of the past 40 years, or will our party follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?” Pence said.

“A new populist movement in the Republican Party says that America should retreat from her leadership position, turn inward and focus solely on domestic concerns,” he said. “Let me say from my heart, anyone who says that America cannot solve our problems at home and be the leader of the free world, there’s a pretty small view of the greatest nation that we have. We must and we will do both for the sake of America, Israel and the world.”

Trump has not said yet how his calls to reduce the American footprint overseas would affect assistance to Israel. He has distanced himself from some of the most robust pro-Israel figures from his term, including Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador; Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state; and Pence.

Trump’s most profound falling-out with Pence was on Jan. 6, 2021, when Pence rebuffed Trump’s exhortations to throw the election to Trump during the congressional review of electoral votes, something Pence was not empowered to do. Trump’s urgings spurred a violent insurrection, with some rioters seeking Pence’s assassination.

Another candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has explicitly called for cutting funding to Israel.

Trump’s slogan since 2016, when he and Pence won the election, has been “America First,” a phrase that was the name of an antisemitic movement of the 1930s and 1940s led by Charles Lindbergh.

‘I love Israel’

In his current campaign, Trump has favored retreat from the international scene and has mocked Israel’s leadership for how it handled Hamas’s deadly October 7 invasion, calling Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant a “jerk” and the Hezbollah terror group “very smart.”

Trump made those remarks earlier this month while recalling his administration’s 2020 assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.

In his address Saturday, he opened by declaring, “I love Israel. I love Israel.”

“If I were president, the attack on Israel would never ever have happened,” he said. And he promised: I will defend America, and I will defend Western civilization from the barbarians and savages and fascists that you see now trying to do harm to our beautiful Israel.”

Support for Israel

At the Republican Jewish Coalition event Saturday, the Republican presidential contenders pledged their unwavering support for Israel in its war with Hamas following the terror group’s October 7 massacre in which thousands of terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,400 people — mostly civilians — and taking 230 hostage, including young children and the elderly.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is “a fight between civilization and savagery, between decency and depravity, and between good and evil,” said Trump, who received the warmest response from attendees, as he took aim at Biden’s administration and avoided criticizing his rivals.

He boasted that if elected president again, he would restore “peace through strength” and would “stop World War III.”

Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN, said Trump was indeed a “pro-Israel president,” but then went on to say: “The question is, what will he do in the future?”

She noted Trump’s comments days after the Hamas attack about Israel’s leadership and also referred to his repeated praise for the autocratic leaders of China and North Korea.

“These are not good or smart people,” Haley said.

Haley warned that Trump’s style of “chaos, vendettas and drama” would be dangerous, making her sharpest critiques of the former president.

“Eight years ago, it was good to have a leader who broke things,” Haley said. “But right now, we need to have a leader who also knows how to put things back together.”

Ramaswamy, whom Pence and Haley have criticized as inexperienced and wrong on foreign policy, drew boos when he said America’s job “is to be strong at home, to mind our own affairs, to avoid foreign military entanglements that do not relate directly to our homeland here.”

But he was cheered throughout much of the rest of his speech, including when he claimed he “would love nothing more” than for the Israeli military “to put the heads of the top 100 Hamas leaders on stakes and line them up on the Israel-Gaza border.”

Also on hand in Las Vegas was Trump’s nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called the Oct 7 Hamas surprise attack on Israel “the most deadly attack against Jews since the Holocaust itself.”

DeSantis noted the official actions he had taken to show support for Israel, from sponsoring charter flights for Americans from Israel to ordering state universities to ban a pro-Palestinian student group.

DeSantis and others pointed to what they said was rising antisemitism on US college campuses, and proposed yanking funding for universities and canceling visas for pro-Palestinian foreign students.

“We need cultural chemotherapy to fight this cancer,” Senator Tim Scott said. “Any student with a visa who calls for genocide should be deported,” he added.

Haley said that, if elected, she would “change the official federal definition of antisemitism to include denying Israel’s right to exist,” adding she would strip tax breaks from schools that do not combat antisemitism.

“College campuses are allowed to have free speech, but they are not free to spread hate that supports terrorism,” she said. “Federal law requires schools to combat antisemitism. We will give this law teeth and we will enforce it.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.