On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mike Pence was a freshman congressman from Indiana who found himself in the office of the chief of Capitol Police, with some of his fellow Republicans on one side of the room and Democrats on the other.
They knew terrorists had just flown airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital. When the police chief received a phone call and told the lawmakers a fourth plane was headed their way, 12 minutes out, the room went silent.
In an interview with The Spokesman-Review on Thursday, in the city where he served as governor after 12 years in Congress, the former vice president recalled how something changed in the room that day as soon as the lawmakers heard reports the inbound plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. The passengers, he would later learn, had fought back against the hijackers, sacrificing their lives to save untold others — and perhaps the Capitol itself.
"I looked around that room, and there were no Republicans, there were no Democrats, there were just Americans," Pence said. "Our country had come under attack, and there I saw the leadership of the House and Senate in both political parties sit together in unity. "
On Sept. 10, the eve of that solemn anniversary, Pence will receive the third annual Thomas S. Foley Award for Distinguished Public Service in an event at Gonzaga University. The award, issued by Washington State University and named for the former Democratic speaker of the House who represented Eastern Washington in Congress for 30 years, recognizes civility, integrity and courage in public service.
"I expect Speaker Foley and I would have had a lot of differences if I'd arrived in Congress the first time I ran in 1988," said Pence, who succeeded in his third run for the House years after Foley was defeated in 1994. "But I believe that it's possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Speaker Foley personified that, and the people that I truly admire in public life on both sides of the aisle have lived that out."
The spirit of unity he saw 25 years ago animated Capitol Hill for months, Pence said, as Democrats and Republicans worked together on an agenda "that would meet the moment." And it gives him confidence that U.S. leaders can rediscover the ability to cooperate to address the challenges facing the nation today — whether foreign adversaries, the technologies that are swiftly upending Americans' lives or the national debt that reached a grim milestone of $40 trillion on Wednesday.
In "What Conservatives Believe," a book published in June, Pence makes a forceful case for civility and lays out a set of priorities and principles he believes define American conservatism, in contrast to what he calls the "right-wing populism" exemplified by the man he served alongside in the White House from 2017 to 2021, President Donald Trump.
Those pillars of Pence's conservatism include defending constitutional rights to religious liberty, free speech and gun ownership; uncompromising opposition to abortion; respect for states' rights and the limited power of the federal government; maintaining a strong military while standing up to America's enemies and with its allies, Israel chief among them; and recognizing that the nation's founders believed Americans' inalienable rights come from God. Throughout the book and in Thursday's interview, he acknowledged various disagreements with Trump while making it clear he remains proud of what they accomplished together, from enacting sweeping tax cuts to appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned nationwide abortion protections.
But any account of Pence's relationship with Trump will be punctuated by the events of Jan. 6, 2021. After the president insisted for weeks he was the rightful winner of an election he had lost and demanded Pence use his ceremonial role to overturn the outcome, the vice president maintained he had no such power and refused Trump's demands.
In a statement in July announcing Pence would receive the award, Cornell Clayton, then the outgoing director of WSU's Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service, said the former vice president "demonstrated remarkable integrity, courage and a commitment to upholding democratic norms in the face of pressures to block or delay the certification of the 2020 election."
For that simple act of loyalty to the nation's 250-year-old principles, rather than deference to the man who has dominated the GOP for a decade, Pence stood out among elected Republicans and drew threats and vitriol from Trump loyalists. Yet in the interview, the former vice president insisted he isn't unique, saying every American soldier has taken the same oath he did and every police officer has faced more adversity.
"In the Book of Psalms, there's a verse that reads, 'He keeps his oath even when it hurts.' I know something about that, but I truly do believe that what has seen this country through 250 years has been a long train of men and women who've been willing to keep faith with the ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States," Pence said. "And so, as I approached those difficult days in January of 2021, my focus was just to keep the oath that I'd taken in January of 2017."
What followed was a personal and political parting of ways that Pence has described as amicable, despite Trump posting on Twitter during the riot that his vice president "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done." The president later defended his supporters for chanting "Hang Mike Pence" while they besieged the Capitol, as Secret Service agents rushed Pence and his family to safety.
In "What Conservatives Believe," Pence describes that day as cause for optimism about the resilience of the American political system.
"What began as a tragedy became a triumph of freedom as Republicans and Democrats reconvened and ensured the peaceful transfer of power," he writes. "The next day, on January 7, Trump denounced the rioters — 'you will pay,' he said — and committed to 'a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power.' "
In the following paragraphs, Pence doesn't mention that 147 Republicans still voted against that transition of power after they returned to the House chamber in the early hours of Jan. 7, after workers cleaned blood and broken glass from the tiled floors of the Capitol. Nor does he note that Trump soon contradicted those prepared remarks and pledged to pardon his supporters who were charged or convicted of crimes for what they did on Jan. 6 — even those who attacked and injured police officers — and fulfilled that promise on his first day back in office.
Instead, Pence moves on to denounce the policies of former President Joe Biden — criticisms that many voters evidently shared when they returned Trump to the White House in 2024, after the brief interruption of the Biden era. While the former vice president criticizes Democrats' policies throughout his book, he draws a distinction between progressives — whom he describes as a sort of mirror image of right-wing populists — and the traditional liberals whose waning influence in the Democratic Party he laments.
"I think that democracy depends on heavy doses of civility. It's something that Speaker Tom Foley understood and personified, and generations of Republicans and Democrats have lived out in the Congress," Pence said in the interview. "As a conservative, I believe we should never compromise on principle, but we can compromise on details, and it's the way the Congress has worked through the generations."
Negative personal attacks have become more common "in the last few decades" of American politics, Pence said — something he said Trump "may have perfected" but didn't invent.
Pence got some experience with that approach to politics when he ran unsuccessfully for the House in 1988 and 1990, then began a stint as a talk radio host, later describing himself as a decaffeinated version of the provocative right-wing radio pioneer Rush Limbaugh. But when he decided to run for Congress for a third time in 2000, he decided to take a different approach.
"As I reflected on what my Christian faith requires of me, I came to believe that if I ever had the opportunity to run for office again, I would seek to run a campaign first that honored God, informed the debate and then was about winning and losing," he said. "And by honoring God, I mean treating others the way I want to be treated, just as my faith requires."
Pence's dedication to the Golden Rule extends beyond politics. That fact came into the spotlight when, three days before the interview, the Atlantic published an essay by Julia Curlee, a transgender woman who served as a senior intelligence analyst in the CIA for two decades, eventually rising to become Pence's briefer when he was vice president.
In the article, Curlee expresses admiration for Pence's commitment to digesting the reams of information on developments around the world that she delivered to him each morning. While Trump "was using his phone to light up Twitter" down the hall, she writes, the vice president "preferred to use our multibillion-dollar intel apparatus to save lives."
She also recalls how, at the end of her tour, Pence invited her parents to the White House.
Curlee describes feeling "an unexplainable conviction that I should have been born a woman," something like homesickness, until she began living as a woman in 2013, but her mother rejected her new identity. So it was especially meaningful when, as she recalls, Pence took her mother's hand and said, "You must be very proud of your daughter."
"No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence," Curlee writes, a line that shot around the internet at a time when Trump and many other Republicans have made transgender people a prominent culture-war target ahead of November's midterm elections.
Pence said he hadn't read Curlee's essay before the interview but he was grateful for her kindness and humbled by her words. He remembered her as "an outstanding intelligence professional who served our administration quite well and made it possible for me to participate in vital discussions about the national security of the United States."
"Whatever differences we may have as Americans, my Bible says God created them male and female, but it also says treat others the way you want to be treated," Pence said. "And I'm glad to know that Julia had a positive experience in her role serving the country in our time in office."
Curlee continued to serve in senior roles throughout the Trump-Pence and Biden-Harris administrations. When Trump returned to office and signed a Day 1 executive order aimed at purging "gender ideology" from the government, she decided to stay — until the right-wing activist Laura Loomer included her on a list of allegedly disloyal "enemies" within the Trump administration.
She was one of some 300,000 federal employees who left or were removed from the nonpartisan civil service in the first year of Trump's second term. Those include nearly everyone who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provided lifesaving humanitarian aid to many of the world's poorest people until Trump empowered the world's richest man, Elon Musk, to gleefully demolish USAID.
Pence said he supports the principle that a president has broad authority to appoint and remove executive-branch employees, though he didn't respond directly to a question about the impact of firing civil servants on the basis of perceived disloyalty to the president. He connected the downsizing of the federal workforce to his small-government conservative principles — "You'd be surprised how much government you'll never miss," he said — and concern about the national debt.
"A $40 trillion national debt represents the greatest threat to the prosperity and security of the American people in the 21st century," Pence said, "and yet both political parties have been unable to produce the political will or leadership to confront that debt and put our fiscal house in order."
The federal government hasn't had a balanced budget since the last fiscal year of the Clinton administration, when the national debt stood at about $5.8 trillion. Since then, presidents and lawmakers of both parties have opted to borrow vast sums of money — burdening future generations of Americans with that debt — rather than living within the nation's means.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq increased spending, as did successive administrations' responses to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans pushed to cut taxes and Democrats spent more on government programs, further increasing annual budget deficits while neither party was willing to incur the wrath of voters with unpopular tax increases or spending cuts.
When Trump and Pence took office in 2017, the national debt stood at just under $20 trillion. It took less than a decade for that number to double, topping $28.5 trillion by the end of the Trump-Pence administration and $36.2 when Biden left office, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
As Pence notes in "What Conservatives Believe," the largest driver of the national debt is the growing cost of Social Security, Medicare and other programs that predominantly benefit retired Americans, while children and working-age people represent an increasingly small share of the population. Finally, the debt itself is a major driver of more debt — interest alone cost American taxpayers $970 billion in the last fiscal year, more than the $916 billion spent on defense.
Despite Trump pledging in February's State of the Union address to Congress to balance the budget, his administration has done the opposite, with a budget deficit of about $2 trillion this fiscal year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sprawling domestic-policy law congressional Republicans enacted in 2025, is projected to add $4.2 trillion to the debt by 2034, despite aiming to cut costs by reducing the number of Americans eligible for Medicaid and food assistance.
As many Americans struggle to afford housing, healthcare and other essentials, the direct and indirect costs of the war with Iran have drawn rare criticism from parts of Trump's political coalition. Some on the right have also objected to Israel's role in launching the war along with the United States, but Pence is a staunch supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance and Trump's decision to strike Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025 and to launch the full-scale war in February.
"I give President Trump all the credit in the world for being willing to take on the mullahs in Tehran directly," he said.
"I still believe there's a truism of history that one does not make peace with one's enemy," Pence added. "One makes peace with one's defeated enemy, and it may well be that in the months ahead that we're going to have to call upon our military once again to convince this radical Islamic regime that holds the people of Iran in a steel grip that they, in fact, have been defeated."
Asked if he would support putting American troops on the ground in Iran, Pence defended Trump's refusal to rule that out, saying a strategic leader should "never say what you'll never do" and adding that "it's a conservative principle that when you go to war, you go to war to win."
The fault line exposed within the GOP by the Iran war is a prime example of the difference Pence identifies between conservatism and right-wing populism, which seeks to withdraw from the dominant role the United States has played in global affairs since the end of World War II.
Asked why he thinks Americans are increasingly drawn toward uncompromising populist leaders on both the left and right, Pence said he senses people are "reaching for solutions" after being disappointed "at a profound level" by recent leaders' inability to address the challenges facing the nation — things like failing schools, persistent crime and the advent of artificial intelligence.
Despite that trend, Pence believes the United States will be better served by a future generation of elected officials, although his book doesn't offer specific solutions to the gerrymandering, partisan primaries and other structural factors that have helped empower more strident leaders. His optimism is founded on the conviction that Americans are fundamentally good people, and their leaders simply need to reflect that.
"I'm convinced the American people are the most faithful and the most generous, the most giving and idealistic people the world has ever known," he said. "We just need government as good as our people, and I believe someday soon we'll have it."
© 2026 The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.). Visit www.spokesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
