ANKNEY, Iowa — If you want to understand why Mike Pence believes he has a shot at winning the presidency, it’s best, friends and advisers say, to look at the framed parchment Bible verse he’s kept on his fireplace for more than 20 years.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future,” reads the verse from Jeremiah, a gift from his wife.
Pence’s plans, spiritual and political, are coming into focus now. On Wednesday, he announced his presidential campaign — a long shot bid to rip the nomination from the grips of the man who made him vice president and then incited a mob that called for his execution.
He and his team believe that there is a path. But seeing it does, to a degree, require a belief in the supernatural.
He’s badly trailing his former running mate, Donald Trump, and finds himself behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by double digits, even with the vast donor network and name ID that comes with having been a former vice president. Perhaps more daunting is that his negatives are higher than any of his competitors: a product, it appears, of not doing Trump’s bidding on that fateful day in January 2021.
While he received a standing ovation at the Herbert Institute for Public Policy in Utah after noting to the audience he did his duty on Jan. 6, he has also been openly heckled by Trump’s base at least twice for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results. One time came in his own backyard at a recent National Rifle Association convention. “Good to see you, too,” he dryly responded to scattered boos at the gathering in Indianapolis earlier this year.
But Pence, with his announcement here and a trip to New Hampshire planned for Friday, is plowing ahead anyway in a primary where his rivals regard him as so little a threat that virtually none of them have yet criticized him by name.
In his announcement speech, Pence said that “the American people deserve to know that on [Jan. 6], President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. Our voters will be faced with the same choice. I chose the Constitution.”
Marc Short, Pence’s longtime confidant, teared up as he stood in the back of the room as Pence talked of Jan. 6. He said the campaign would be the “least poll-tested campaign,” and sloughed off Pence’s current position in the field. He, like other true Pence believers, thinks the race is more wide open than conventional wisdom suggests.
“He doesn’t have the same measuring stick,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and former neighbor of Pence. “He’s talking to his wife, and he’s reading the Bible, and he’s praying about it and trying to figure out if this is what God wants him to do. He’s probably paying more attention to that than he is any polling. That doesn’t mean he does not consider it. It’s just not his priority.”
In an often sunny speech dripping with references to Ronald Reagan and scripture at a Future Farmers of America Enrichment Center here, Pence introduced himself to voters as a pre-Trump conservative on issues ranging from foreign policy to abortion rights.
“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 he promised to govern as a conservative,” Pence said. “Together we did just that. Today he makes no such promise.”
For years, Pence prided himself in having his finger on the pulse of the conservative movement — “I was Tea Party before it was cool,” he once said — a bomb-throwing talking head on Fox News crusading against the likes of George W. Bush and John Boehner before Boehner brought him to heel as the chair of the Republican Study Committee. And for more than a decade, Pence has had his eye on the White House, eschewing potential campaigns in 2012 and 2016. It was during that latter cycle that Trump plucked him from the Midwest to be his running mate, saving him a tough reelection battle.
Pence’s theory of the case is based on a mix of divine intervention and a Rube Goldberg machine-like series of events. It goes like this: Trump and DeSantis cancel each other out in a murder-suicide pact, and Pence steals the evangelical vote in Iowa away from them both, as well as Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, who are vying for the same slice of caucus-goers.
Pence, his aides hope, will ultimately emerge from the rubble as a happy warrior who can tout the policy victories of the Trump era — with all of its ideology and none of its id — one who can connect better with voters in grassroots setting better than the top two candidates, particularly in all 99 Iowa counties aides say he’ll visit at least once.
But that’s a lot of hope on which to rest a candidacy.
“He's going to get a polite reception from groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition or Family Leader and these more socially conservative, Christian-oriented political groups,” said David Kochel, the veteran Iowa GOP strategist. “But at the end of the day, a lot of what we've seen about Pence is that he was disloyal, he could have done more, and that’s in the water, too. So he probably has a low ceiling. But he has the potential for a good showing with that block of voters in Northwest Iowa and elsewhere, but I don’t see him winning the Iowa caucuses.”
Much of Pence’s campaign is predicated on the idea of reintroducing himself as more than just Trump’s former vice president. Pence’s favorability tanked after Jan. 6, according to multiple polls. An April 2023 poll from The Wall Street Journal found that 60 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of him, up from 54 percent in December. Just 29 percent had a favorable view of him.
But both Pence and those around him insist they can overcome that — saying he is well known but not known well. They think he’ll at least get a shake from voters. After all, he is, they say, the former vice president and should be taken seriously.
And then there’s that verse from Jeremiah that’s still in his head. Between that, his wife, Karen, and a tightly knit clutch of loyal advisers, Pence is convinced, allies say, that he has a way forward.
Still, even some of those allies don’t believe he does. Republican state Sen. Josh Kimbrell of deep-red Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and, like Pence, a former talk show radio host, spent part of 2021 and 2022 guiding him around his early voting state. Last May, he told POLITICO that Pence was building a “groundswell of grassroots support here” and had done “a very good job of connecting with what I would say is the bread and butter of the Republican primary electorate.”
But in an interview with POLITICO this spring, Kimbrell had landed in a different place, speaking more favorably of DeSantis, whom he said had a “good pathway to win the presidency.”
As for Pence? “I still think he's a good person,” Kimbrell said. “I still think he would make a great president. I think in the current environment, he would have a hard time winning the Republican nomination.”
In some ways, Pence’s campaign is an ideological rescue mission as much as it is a political one: He is running, he has said, to restore the soul of traditional economic and foreign policy conservatism, while fusing it with the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration. Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who served as Pence’s lieutenant governor but is not ready to make an endorsement, told POLITICO that he is “ecstatic that he is talking about substance.”
“He’s talking about the things that are bankrupting this country,” Holcomb, who is term limited, said.
Former Indiana Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Gregg, who twice challenged Pence and remains in a text-friendly relationship with his old opponent, said Pence is in the exact position most beneficial to him.
“Mike Pence’s greatest strength is that people underestimate him,” Gregg said. “They really do. I did. They think he’s kind of a lightweight. And that man is the most focused, on-message candidate they’re ever going to meet.”
For Pence, there are worse things than being an underdog. He counts as his favorite movie Hoosiers, the 1980s basketball film about a small town high school team led to an improbable state championship by a washed out college coach. In fact, Pence had a chance to be an extra in the movie, he told POLITICO last year, but ultimately didn’t go to the filming at Hinkle Fieldhouse while living in nearby Broad Ripple. One path not taken but, perhaps, part of a larger plan.
“That’s just where he loves to be,” said Jeff Cardwell, a friend since the 1980s who Pence installed as state Republican Party chair when he was governor, and who remains in close touch with him. “He loves to be underestimated. Coming in as, with low expectations, the underdog, that’s a great place to step in.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Critics challenging a new Florida law that blocks some Chinese citizens and other foreigners from owning land in the state asked a federal court this week to block its implementation.
They say the new law, which takes effect July 1, is too vague and risks creating "Chinese exclusion zones" across vast swaths of the state, including many of Florida's largest cities. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the measure, FL SB264 (23R), into law in May.
"SB 264 fails to provide people of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to understand whether their property is subject to the law’s prohibitions," lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida wrote in their motion for an emergency preliminary injunction filed Tuesday.
A Florida Department of Economic Opportunity spokesperson said that the agency does not comment on pending litigation while a spokesperson for Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson did not provide a comment when requested. Both Simpson and the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, among others, are defendants in the case.
States across the country, including California and Texas, have introduced more than a dozen similar pieces of legislation in recent months. Florida’s would be the first to be enacted into law.
The lawsuit filed in U. S. District Court in Tallahassee is among several challenging recent actions by the GOP-controlled Legislature and DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president.
"We have a lot — a big increase in the number of people who are Chinese nationals coming," DeSantis said Wednesday during an event in Arizona. "Clearly the CCP is a major threat to this country and we need to make sure we are recognizing that."
Under the law, anyone buying agricultural land or property within 10 miles of a military base, installation or designated "critical" infrastructure must sign an affidavit saying they are not prohibited under state law from doing so.
It labels seven nations as a "foreign country of concern": China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela.
According to the law, anyone "domiciled" in those nations who are not "lawful" U.S. residents may not purchase agricultural land after July 1. They are not allowed to buy other lands within 10 miles of military installations or critical infrastructure.
The new law specifically prohibits those from China from owning additional property or buying more than a single parcel of two acres that must be at least five miles from a military installation.
The bill faced opposition in the Legislature from Chinese Americans and visitors from China who said it would subject them to discrimination. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund joined the ACLU in May in suing the state on behalf of their clients.
The House bill sponsor, state Rep. David Borrero (R-Sweetwater), drew jeers from a committee hearing audience in April when he responded that the only people affected by the legislation would be members of the Chinese Community Party.
"This is your home — you have nothing to worry about," Borrero said. "You may purchase land."
In their request to U. S. District Judge Allen C. Winsor for an injunction, the plaintiffs argue that the state law is preempted by federal statutes and regulations that balance foreign affairs and national security with foreign investment.
"SB 264 upends that balance," the plaintiffs contend. "Disregarding the federal government’s judgments regarding the appropriate approach to China and other foreign nations, Florida has adopted its own draconian regulation of land purchases."
The opponents also argue that it's unclear who the law would apply to because "domiciled" has a stricter meaning under state law and could apply to those in the U.S. who have not been granted permanent residence status.
The "same uncertainty will undoubtedly chill sellers, agents, insurance companies, and countless others from doing business with noncitizens who may or may not be deemed to be 'domiciled' in China or another covered country," they stated.
The groups wrote that it's also unclear what is "critical" infrastructure or a military "installation" under the new law.
Critical infrastructure is defined by the law to include sea ports, airports, power plants or telecommunications systems. Military bases or installations must be more than 10 acres in size.
The groups argue that those are broadly and vaguely defined terms and that those who are affected now have no maps to determine where those zones are when the law takes effect July 1.
The law "will have the net effect of creating 'Chinese exclusion zones' that will cover immense portions of Florida, including many of the state’s most densely populated and developed areas," the injunction request stated.
And many other people will avoid buying property altogether to avoid unknowingly falling within an exclusion zone, the groups wrote.
Regulators in charge of ensuring that artificial intelligence helps — and doesn’t harm — patients could use AI to do it, a former FDA official said Wednesday at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit.
Bakul Patel, who for years worked on digital health initiatives at the FDA before becoming head of digital health regulatory strategy at Google, said regulators need to think differently about how they set rules for the nascent technology.
“We need to start thinking: How do we use technology to … make technology a partner in the regulation?” he said.
Most of the focus in Washington on AI centers on how agencies should regulate its use by the private sector, with the FDA planning rules for its use in health care.
In health care, researchers are using machine learning to develop new therapies. AI even assisted researchers in identifying high-risk strains of Covid-19.
Doctors are using it to help them diagnose diseases and plan care.
At the summit, Shannon Thyme Klinger, chief legal officer at Moderna, highlighted the possibility that AI can accelerate vaccine development and diversify the populations involved in studies.
But flawed algorithms can harm patients. AI has cut off coverage for some Medicare Advantage members and ingrained racial bias in care in some instances.
“There needs to be a really robust set of guidelines on fairness and bias checking,” Hirsh Jain, the head of public health and senior vice president of federal at Palantir Technologies, the Denver software developer, said at the summit.
Jain said the federal government and industry should collaborate on developing guardrails to avoid a patchwork of regulations written by the states.
Cris Ross, who is in charge of information technology at Mayo Clinic, said it is cognizant of the need for care in using patient data in AI and on relying on AI to make critical medical decisions.
Still, Mayo is moving ahead with the technology. Google recently announced its artificial intelligence would be embedded in Mayo Clinic’s computer systems in an effort to improve patient care.
Only minutes into a doomed journey that ended on a remote Virginia mountain, the pilot of a business jet was not responding to air traffic control instructions and the situation was soon reported to a network that includes military, security and law enforcement agencies, according to federal aviation officials.
Despite being out of contact on its ascent Sunday afternoon, the jet that had just taken off from a Tennessee airport continued toward its intended destination on New York’s Long Island, then turned to fly back to Virginia where it slammed into a mountain, killing the four people aboard.
Family and friends identified two of the victims as an entrepreneur known in New York real-estate circles and her 2-year-old daughter.
Outside aviation experts continued to speculate that the pilot likely lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen inside the jet when it climbed above 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), the altitude that typically requires cabin pressurization.
“The most likely scenario right now is a pressurization failure or a mis-setting of the pressurization system,” said Alan Diehl, an aviation psychologist who previously worked for the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Air Force. In the late 1960s, Diehl also helped design the original model of the plane, the Cessna Citation, that crashed in Virginia.
It’s unclear when the pilot stopped responding to air traffic controllers. But their last attempt to reach him occurred 15 minutes after takeoff, according to the FAA.
The plane could have surpassed 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) in just a few minutes, Diehl said. However, the pilot may have had to wait for some period of time after takeoff before he was cleared for higher altitudes.
Depending on the jet’s altitude as well as the pilot’s age and health, he likely had minutes — or even less than a minute — to react as his brain suffered a decline in oxygen, Diehl said.
“The one other thing that they probably can’t eliminate at this point is some kind of medical issue,” Diehl said.
A heart attack, brain aneurysm and over-the-counter medications, such as antihistamines, can affect a pilot’s ability to fly the airplane and recognize there may be a problem with the cabin’s oxygen levels and pressurization.
Fighter jet pilots sent to intercept the business jet reported that its pilot appeared slumped over and unresponsive, three U.S. officials said Monday. The officials had been briefed on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the military operation.
The plane took an erratic flight path — turning around over Long Island to fly directly over the nation’s capital — which prompted the military to scramble fighter jets. This caused a sonic boom heard in Washington, Maryland and Virginia.
John Rumpel, the owner of the plane, said his daughter, Adina Azarian, 2-year-old granddaughter, Aria, and the girl’s nanny were the victims, along with the pilot. He said they were returning to their home on Long Island, after visiting his house in North Carolina.
Rumpel told The Associated Press on Tuesday that new radios had been installed in the plane two or three weeks ago and the aircraft was equipped with emergency oxygen. Rumpel said he also believes the pilot, who he identified as Jeff Hefner, probably lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen. Rumpel said Hefner had recently had a physical and he was not aware of any concerning medical conditions.
“He was top shelf, absolutely top shelf. I wouldn’t have had my daughter and my grandbaby fly with him if he wasn’t,” Rumpel said Tuesday.
Rumpel said he wonders if a flashing light on the plane that should have warned the pilot that he was losing oxygen somehow malfunctioned.
“To the best of my knowledge, the emergency masks never dropped,” he said.
Rumpel also said it is common practice for pilots to put their destination, along with an “emergency return destination” into the auto pilot system, which he said would explain why the plane turned around and headed south again once it flew over its destination of MacArthur Airport on Long Island. He said the emergency return destination would have been the airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, where the flight took off from.
On Monday, it took investigators several hours to hike into the rural area where the plane crashed about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southwest of Charlottesville. They expected to be on the scene for at least three to four days.
Diehl, the aviation psychologist, said investigators often dig deeply into a pilot’s background following a crash. For instance, did he or she have training in the military to recognize the signs of low-cabin pressure? Were they a risk taker? What were the results of their last flight physical?
Investigators will also review the recordings of the pilot’s last communications with air traffic control. They’ll check for a change in speech patterns, such as slower talking, that could indicate low-oxygen levels. But testing oxygen levels in blood and human tissue could be unlikely given the high impact of the crash, Diehl said.
At a briefing Monday, NTSB investigator Adam Gerhardt said the wreckage is “highly fragmented” and investigators will examine the most delicate evidence at the site, after which the wreckage will be moved, perhaps by helicopter, to Delaware, where it can be further examined. It was not clear if the plane had a flight data recorder. A preliminary report will be released in 10 days.
The Virginia State Police said human remains will be brought to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsy and identification. Authorities said the victims included the pilot and three passengers. There were no survivors.
The plane took off from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Tennessee at 1:13 p.m. Sunday. Air Traffic Control lost communication with the airplane during its ascent, according to the NTSB.
Preliminary information indicates the last air traffic control communication attempt with the airplane was at approximately 1:28 p.m., when the plane was at 31,000 feet (9,449 meters), the NTSB said. About eight minutes later, the FAA reported the situation to the Domestic Events Network, which includes military, national security, homeland security and other law enforcement agencies.
The plane flew directly over the nation’s capital. According to the Pentagon, six F-16 fighter jets were deployed to intercept the plane, including two from a base in Maryland, two from New Jersey and two from South Carolina.
The plane climbed to 34,000 feet (10,363 kilometers), where it remained for the rest of the flight until 3:23 p.m. when it began to descend and crashed about nine minutes later, according to the NTSB.
Chris Christie is making another run for the White House — a long-shot campaign in which the former New Jersey governor will seek to position himself as the field’s most credible critic of Donald Trump.
Christie, who filed campaign paperwork on Tuesday, has spent weeks sharpening his attacks on Trump in preparation for his launch, testing a message that he — and he alone in the growing field of 2024 GOP contenders — has the guts and the skill to knock the former president off his perch atop the party.
The problem for Christie: It was too little, too late when he tried that tactic in 2016. And Republican primary voters don’t seem any more open to it today.
Trump continues to hold double-digit leads over the rest of the field — numbers that improved as his legal woes deepened and as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fell back before he entered the race.
Christie, meanwhile, has been largely an afterthought in surveys, registering in the low single digits, if at all. He would need to score at least 1 percent support in three national surveys and have at least 40,000 unique donors (and also commit to supporting the party’s eventual nominee, even if it’s Trump) just to qualify for the first debate on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.
Still, Christie, 60, has said he wouldn’t enter the primary unless he saw a path to victory, maintaining that he’s “not a paid assassin.” His foray into the Republican field is the result of weeks of public and private deliberations in which he’s huddled with donors and old political allies and trekked to New Hampshire for two town halls. He’ll launch his campaign in another New Hampshire town hall on Tuesday with the backing of a super PAC helmed by longtime advisers.
Christie’s last presidential campaign went down in flames. He logged more visits to New Hampshire than any other GOP candidate in 2016. But he dropped out of the race after finishing in a dismal sixth place in the first-in-the-nation primary with little more than a debate-stage evisceration of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to show for his efforts.
He then turned around and endorsed Trump, becoming the first of his former rivals to do so and setting off a coalescence of GOP brass behind the brash outsider that Christie now says was a “strategic error.”
Christie has eschewed the notion of needing a lane this time around. But he’s carved a clear one for himself as Trump’s chief critic — bludgeoning the former president at a time when his competitors and would-be rivals continue to measure their remarks about the polling leader. He called himself not just a viable Trump alternative in a recent Daily Beast interview, but “the viable Trump alternative.”
Christie blames Trump for Republicans’ losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and argues the party will lose again if he’s the nominee in 2024.
But the great GOP reckoning the establishment hoped for after the party’s underperformance in last year’s midterms hasn’t happened. Instead, the former president continues to hold many state parties and grassroots activists in a vise grip — a reality Christie now has to navigate in his quest for the nomination.
And voters are already questioning Christie’s anti-Trump bona fides given his long allyship with the former president. Christie, who stuck with Trump through 2020 until his election denials began, claims he wouldn’t vote for Trump again. But he also told an audience in New Hampshire that, knowing what he knows now, he’d still pick Trump over his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton.
In addition to pummeling Trump, Christie has repeatedly laid into DeSantis, slamming his foreign policy chops after the Florida Republican mangled his stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine and skewering his handling of his ongoing battle with Disney.
Christie plans to again run a New Hampshire-focused campaign, despite likely GOP primary voters in the state showing little interest in the former New Jersey governor in a pair of spring surveys.
His old allies in the state are starting to come on board again. Former New Hampshire GOP Chair Wayne MacDonald said in an interview late last month that he’s “absolutely” with Christie again even after being “approached” by other campaigns for support.
“Those of us who supported him in New Hampshire are excited about the prospects of him running again,” MacDonald said. “He's a great candidate, he’ll be a great president.”
