WASHINGTON ― GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence met with House Republicans on Tuesday, assuring his former colleagues that Donald Trump would take up their agenda.
The Indiana governor talked about the time he had spent with Trump prior to accepting the nomination, and attempted to allay any remaining concerns about the Republican presidential nominee.
“It was, for me, an emotional return,” Pence said at a press conference after the meeting at the Capitol Hill Club.
But the event wasn’t completely positive.
According to one lawmaker present, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) told Pence that his daughter felt as though Trump hated women.
Pence responded by citing polls suggesting that the businessman’s numbers are strong among married women, and he indicated that Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he supports paid maternity leave would further help his image with women.
Pence ― who on Monday refused to call David Duke “deplorable” and instead insisted he wasn’t “in the name-calling business” ― was asked again about the Ku Klux Klan’s former leader. He launched into a long attack on Hillary Clinton and her comment that half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables,” but still refused to say Duke exhibited those traits.
“The simple fact is that I’m not in the name-calling business,” Pence said again, adding that he wasn’t going to “validate the language that Hillary Clinton used to describe the American people.”
Pence said neither he nor Trump wanted Duke’s vote, but shrugged off a question about whether he was concerned that Trump’s campaign had drawn such enthusiastic support from white supremacists.
“We live in a free country,” Pence said. “And people of ill motives can associate themselves with politics.”
“I would draw no more conclusion of that man’s expressions of support than I would the fact that the father of a terrorist who killed 49 Americans was seen at a Hillary Clinton rally cheering her on,” he continued, referring to the father of the man who opened fire on a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June.
Overall, Republicans seemed quite pleased with Pence’s performance. Pence name-checked House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Better Way agenda, and said that Trump wanted to work with House Republicans on enacting their policies.
“So, there was some, like, connective tissue that I haven’t seen before,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said.
Pence also talked about the Supreme Court and “reassured conservatives in there that Donald Trump would put strict constitutionalists in the mold of Antonin Scalia on the court,” Massie said.
There was one potentially awkward situation: Someone asked Pence, who was standing beside Ryan, what he made of the speaker calling out Trump repeatedly, and whether that had made it more difficult to win over moderate voters.
Pence sidestepped the question.
“My and Donald Trump’s respect and appreciation for Speaker Paul Ryan is boundless,” he said. “Look, you’re going to have, in a majority party, you’re going to occasionally have differences of opinion. But our goals are identical.”
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