Mike Pence is starting a podcast
The former vice president is going back to his roots in radio. This time, with a slightly bigger name ID.
Mike Pence is returning to his radio roots after a 22-year hiatus from the airwaves.
The former vice president will launch a podcast in the coming months hosted by the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization dating back to the 1960s. Pence will join YAF as the group’s first Ronald Reagan presidential scholar, and is expected to become a regular member of its campus lecture circuit once it is safe to resume such events, which have been halted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Vice President Pence has been a stalwart defender of individual freedom, traditional values, free markets, and limited government throughout his career of distinguished service to our country,” said former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who took the reins of the Virginia-based organization earlier this year. “Now, by partnering with YAF, the Vice President will continue to attract new hearts and minds to the conservative cause.”
His “energy and enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan’s values has and will continue to inspire a new generation of young people,” Walker added in a statement.
Pence left office last month amid a strained relationship with former President Donald Trump following his certification of Joe Biden’s election in the Senate and the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. The latest gig is an effort to smooth his transition back into the upper ranks of the conservative movement — a development that comes as his former boss remains secluded in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago estate, awaiting a second impeachment trial in the Senate.
On Thursday, Pence announced that he would join the Heritage Foundation, another conservative institution, as a distinguished visiting fellow focused on public policy.
Hosting a podcast won’t be an entirely new venture for Pence, who is 61. A former Indiana governor, he spent a decade prior to his 2000 election to Congress as a prominent conservative radio personality in the Midwest — a trade he then used to launch his political career. His YAF-sponsored show, which will be aimed at a younger audience than the listeners he drew years ago on “The Mike Pence Show,” is similar to an arrangement the conservative youth group had with Reagan, then the governor of California, when YAF served as a sponsor for his daily radio commentary in the mid-1970s.
“The vice president will certainly be focused on the conservative accomplishments of the last four years and projecting those accomplishments and lessons learned forward,” a spokesperson for Pence said.
Pence is also said to be eyeing a potential book deal, and has plans to create a new fundraising committee that would serve as his main conduit to Republican donors as he works to boost House and Senate GOP candidates in the 2022 midterm elections and weighs a future presidential bid of his own in 2024.
The former vice president, who recently returned from a post-White House vacation to the Caribbean island of Saint Croix, is currently living in the Washington suburbs with plans to keep a presence in both D.C. and his home state of Indiana moving forward.