Pence and Flake

How Donald Trump Came Between Mike Pence and Jeff Flake

They used to be brothers in arms. Now one is being driven off the battlefield, and the other is the president’s right-hand man. How one relationship explains the fractured GOP.

By TIM ALBERTA

They had been tight for two decades: Both ran conservative think tanks in their states in the 1990s; both were elected to the U.S. Congress in 2000, at one point occupying neighboring offices; both were lonely leaders of intraparty rebellions during the big-spending tenure of President George W. Bush; both left the House of Representatives in 2012 to run successfully for statewide office; above all, both strove to be regarded as gentleman conservatives, known for a personal decency that infused their relationships and reputations in the nation’s capital.

And yet both men knew, after one fateful week in July 2016, that their friendship would never be the same. The reason: Donald Trump.

On a Thursday afternoon, one of these men, a junior senator from a Western state, found himself locked in a tense verbal confrontation with Trump. The presumptive GOP nominee was visiting Washington, D.C., to meet with Senate Republicans, and the niceties came to a sudden halt when Trump singled out one of them—Jeff Flake—for having criticized his candidacy. “Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona, the one that wasn’t captured,” Flake responded, referring to Trump’s infamous assessment that John McCain was “not a war hero” and that he preferred “people who weren’t captured.” Flake, who was meeting Trump face to face for the first time that day, told the soon-to-be-nominee: “I want to talk to you about statements like that.”

Exactly one week after that showdown—nearly to the minute—reports surfaced that Trump had selected Mike Pence, the former congressman and then-governor of Indiana, as his vice presidential running mate. Pence would soon be whisked from Indianapolis to New York, where he was introduced over the weekend, before being formally nominated alongside Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland the following week.

Flake had not planned to attend. In fact, as Trump snapped back at him in D.C. that day—predicting that Flake’s dissent would cost him his Senate seat—he took comfort in knowing he wouldn’t be sitting in the convention hall as Trump completed his hostile takeover of the GOP. But Trump’s pick of Pence—which, Flake tells me, left him in a state of “shock”—forced him to reconsider. He wouldn’t just be turning his back on Trump and the Republican Party by shunning the convention; he would be betraying one of his closest friends.

Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to change Flake’s mind. He stayed away from Cleveland, in protest of Trump—while his old pal Pence was crowned as his heir apparent.

The ascent of the 45th president has left a wreckage of relationships in its wake—neighbors, friends and families divided along lines of partisanship if not political philosophy. Yet there has been no more dramatic divergence than that of Pence and Flake, once ideological soulmates and indivisible comrades who now embody the right’s most extreme reactions to Trumpism. Pence, who grew enamored of it, accommodated it and ultimately embraced it, sits at the right hand of the president, wields considerable influence inside the White House, polls as the most popular Republican in Washington and is widely viewed as the de facto leader of the GOP. Flake, on the other hand, rejected and rebuked Trumpism with force—writing a book denouncing the president and even chastising him from the Senate floor, albeit not by name, for his “indecency” and his “reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior.” The consequences have been proportionately severe: Flake, having seen his popularity in Arizona crater, made those brutal floor remarks in a speech announcing his retirement from the Senate. Trump’s prophecy had been fulfilled.

The distance traveled is not merely political. A late November dinner at the vice presidential residence—attended by several other senators, and centered on tax reform—was the first meeting in months for Pence and Flake. The old friends had not even spoken when Flake announced his retirement. In an interview on the eve of the dinner, I ask Flake, who wears a pained expression when talking about Pence, if the unraveling of their relationship makes him sad. “Yeah. It does. It does,” Flake whispers, looking past me. He thinks for a moment. “But I guess those who have embraced Trumpism, or are resigned to it … ” Flake’s voice trails off. Pence’s office, asked for comment on his relationship with Flake, said in a statement, “The vice president, like the president, is eager and willing to work with any member of Congress that wants to work in the best interest of the country.”

The parting paths taken by these two elected officials tell a story bigger and more compelling than just their own. How this pair with so much in common wound up occupying opposite poles on the right’s political spectrum speaks not just to their individual ambitions and flaws and decisions, but also to the mercurial nature of conservatism today—and the changed electorate responsible for the rise of Trump. Both men realized, at the sunset of the Obama era, that something was fundamentally broken in the GOP—“a Republican Party that had lost its way,” as Pence described it to me during the 2016 campaign. Both witnessed mounting anger and anxiety in the country—especially in the party’s base—and felt compelled to act. Yet they ultimately allied themselves with radically different approaches: one viewing the nation’s disquiet as a problem to be solved, the other viewing it as a political advantage to be exploited.

***

When President Bush delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress, in February 2001, Pence and Flake found neighboring seats in the House chamber. It made sense—fellow House freshmen, fellow conservatives, both skeptical of the young administration’s philosophy about the size and scope of government. It was a practice they would continue at almost every presidential address to come; they were easily noticed side by side, Pence’s helmet of white hair a glowing contrast with Flake’s bronzed complexion. As Bush, in that first speech, ran through a list of ambitious ideas for the government to pursue, eliciting loyal applause from Republicans, Flake recalls Pence leaning over and whispering to him: “Just because I’m a-clappin’ for it, doesn’t mean I’m a-votin’ for it.”

Sure enough, Flake and Pence quickly distinguished themselves as problem children in Bush’s GOP. Both of them bucked the president on his first major domestic initiative, No Child Left Behind, aghast at the prospect of Washington’s unprecedented intrusion into K-12 education. They defied the administration on another sweeping proposal, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, seeing a massive entitlement expansion packaged as a gift to seniors in battleground Florida. They led the charge to eliminate earmarks, making powerful enemies in both parties. They voted to kill the first Wall Street bailout in fall 2008—sending markets tumbling and prompting whispers of an imminent financial apocalypse. And they voted against the second version, which became law, as well.

The bailout votes laid the foundation for revolutionary forces that followed: the Tea Party, the House Freedom Caucus and ultimately Trump. But predating all these phenomena, there were Pence and Flake, the loyal opposition inside a GOP that controlled Washington but seemed untethered from conservative principle and its own creed of limited government.

“They were pushing back against their own party’s president. They were calling out the hypocrisy, and they weren’t loved for it among the leadership and the establishment,” says Sheila Cole, who was then policy director at the House’s conservative Republican Study Committee, of which Pence later became chairman. “They didn’t back down, ever. That was typical Pence and typical Flake.”

Flake says that from Day One, he and Pence “hit it off” because of their shared bewilderment at the disconnect between the GOP’s practices and its principles. “It was crazy what our own party was doing in that environment,” he says. “This was the heyday of spending wildly.” It wasn’t simply fiscal recklessness that maddened the upstart conservatives. GOP leadership in the House would often stray from regular order—a painstaking process that allows for lengthy hearings, debates and amendments—in the pursuit of bloodless victories. Flake recalls how he and Pence would camp out in their offices late at night, worried that leadership would attempt to pass a bill by unanimous consent—that is, with no one on the House floor to object. More than once, they literally sprinted down the corridors of the Capitol and burst onto the House floor to halt the proceedings. “One of the staffers said we looked like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, coming through those swinging doors,” Flake laughs. “So we’ve called each other ‘Butch’ and ‘Sundance’ jokingly ever since.” (He did not specify who was who.)

Their alliance transcended politics. Although Pence moved his young family to D.C. and Flake kept his back home in his Arizona district, their children became friends, and their wives grew even closer. Regular visits from Flake’s family almost always culminated in dinners, and when their families weren’t around, the two chauffeured each other around town—fundraisers, dinners, charity events. They were different in certain ways—Flake a Mormon, for instance, and Pence an ex-Roman Catholic evangelical—but their worldviews aligned so closely that it hardly mattered. (Flake doesn’t drink, and Pence would never drink unless his wife was accompanying him.) Flake would regularly loiter in Pence’s office, which kept a supply of fresh-popped popcorn that his colleague from Arizona found irresistible. When Flake, on his 20th wedding anniversary, found himself stuck in Washington for a busy week of votes, Pence worked secretly with Flake’s wife to arrange a surprise dinner for them on the rooftop of the W Hotel. (Pence lured Flake there under the guise of a meeting with some prominent Indiana donors.)

As the two lawmakers gained star power inside the conservative movement for their struggles against GOP excess, they also managed to win the affection of party leaders—especially the House Republican chief, John Boehner—who respected their approach. This combination made Pence and Flake valuable commodities in the Tea Party era, as the GOP base veered right in response to the policy betrayals of Bush and the perceived overreach of President Barack Obama. Watching in 2010 as the conservative insurgency arrived in D.C., bringing dozens of right-wing troublemakers to Congress, both men set their sights on higher office.

***

Political purity can be both a blessing and a curse. In the House, Pence and Flake amassed two of the GOP’s most ideologically pristine voting records. The various “scorecards” issued by outside advocacy groups—rating lawmakers on a scale of 100 based on their votes—consistently found them to be two of the most conservative members in Congress. For seven consecutive years, from 2005 to 2011, Flake earned a 100 percent rating from the Club for Growth, and was celebrated in the top spot on the group’s rankings of all 435 House members. For three of those years, Pence tied him at No. 1; in the other four years, Pence’s scores were 89 percent, 97 percent and 99 percent twice.

Both Pence and Flake cashed in on that conservative credibility in 2012. Setting out to become Indiana’s governor and Arizona’s junior senator, respectively, they leaned hard on their reputations as original Tea Partyers. But by setting the bar impossibly high for themselves, they set up allies and constituents for inevitable disillusionment. Winning election in small, bright red districts is not like winning statewide, and there were early indications of creeping modulation: In 2012, Pence scored his lowest mark ever with the Club for Growth, at 78 percent; Flake was far higher, at 96 percent, but it was the first time in his House career without a perfect score.

Pence, known as both a fiscal hawk and a culture warrior in the House, ran a gubernatorial campaign narrowly tailored around job creation and economic growth, heeding the advice of his popular predecessor, Mitch Daniels, who had called for a “truce” on social issues. In Arizona, Flake, who in the House had teamed with liberal Illinois Representative Luis Gutiérrez to co-author a comprehensive immigration reform bill, tacked right on immigration in the GOP Senate primary, denouncing any sweeping approach and arguing for border security measures as a standalone prerequisite for dealing with the undocumented immigrant community.

As governor, Pence found himself pinched between the state’s business titans and the local and national conservative movement. Pence had always been at the forefront of cultural fights—same-sex marriage, abortion, gays serving in the military. He had also been a leading critic of the Affordable Care Act when it passed in 2010. But things became less black and white once he was an executive. Pence accepted federal dollars to expand Medicaid under Obama’s health law, one of 18 Republican governors to do so, yet customized the program in Indiana so that beneficiaries were required to pay into health savings accounts. There were critics on both the left and right, but the move was generally praised as both principled and pragmatic.

The same couldn’t be said for his handling of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In spring 2015, eyeing a potential run for the presidency—and wary that he hadn’t done enough to champion social conservatism during his governorship—Pence supported and eventually signed a divisive bill that conservatives said would protect religious liberties. The ensuing national uproar, and grave warnings from business leaders about the consequences of perceived state-sanctioned discrimination against gay people, caused Pence to backpedal and seek fixes to the legislation—which, in turn, infuriated the evangelical community. Iowa radio host Steve Deace later told Politico of Pence’s about-face, “It was the worst we’ve ever been stabbed in the back by a Republican.”

But Pence’s apostasy was forgiven—or perhaps simply forgotten—almost instantaneously when he joined Trump’s ticket. It no longer seemed to matter that he had expanded Medicaid, or that he had bungled the religious-liberty controversy, or that his popularity had plummeted among Hoosiers of all partisan stripes as a result. Joining Trump meant a new lease on political life—with the national narrative focusing on the sweep of his conservative career, rather than the more recent and complicated picture in Indiana.

Flake had moved even more swiftly toward the middle. Almost immediately upon joining the Senate, he teamed with a bipartisan group of seven other senators—the “Gang of Eight”—to pursue exactly what he had rejected on the campaign trail in 2012: comprehensive immigration reform. Flake’s flip-flop, however politically distasteful, was rooted in the conviction that the immigration debate was fueling a frightful polarization in the country. Taking the issue off the table, he believed, would be good for both America and the Republican Party. The grassroots, however, didn’t see a problem-solving exercise; they saw the GOP pandering to political correctness and selling out its blue-collar voters.

The immigration play wasn’t Flake’s worst offense in the eyes of conservatives. While running for Senate, the congressman had promised to be the same renegade he was in the House. “He said he was going to go to the Senate and help the Jim DeMint guys to stand up to the Senate Republican leadership,” the blogger Erick Erickson, who endorsed Flake in that 2012 campaign, recalls. Instead, Senator Flake became a reliable ally for GOP leader Mitch McConnell, voting for the type of bills that he had routinely torpedoed in the lower chamber. This was reflected in his Club for Growth scorecard: Flake’s first four years in the Senate, 2013 through 2016, pegged him at 84, 90, 93 and 84 percent—solidly conservative, but not staunchly.

In the fall of 2013, when Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee charged head-first into a government shutdown with their last-ditch attempt to defeat Obamacare, Flake infuriated conservatives by refusing to join. Brent Bozell, the longtime conservative movement figurehead, remembers a meeting in Lee’s office with a handful of senators and conservative activist leaders. Lee, he says, pleaded with his colleagues to sign a letter pledging to do whatever was necessary to stop Obamacare—and Flake made a show of not signing it. “That was the moment we all knew,” Bozell tells me, “this man is a fraud.” From Flake’s perspective, it was about maturing as a lawmaker: The Obamacare stunt was a prime example of doing something to prove a point rather than to solve problems—something he had been prone to doing in the House, but wanted to move beyond in the Senate.

Even as Flake lost some of his luster on the right, his reputation as a conservative remained broadly intact. The immigration bill was chalked up to home-state sensitivities and his Mormon convictions about aiding the unwelcome. It wasn’t until he went to war with Trump that a pent-up sense of betrayal from onetime allies came spilling out. “Three years ago, I was beginning to hear people call him a Benedict Arnold who had abandoned things he had once stood for,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh says.

The Arizona senator has been relentless with his critiques of the president. And yet some conservatives believe Republicans like Flake are responsible for Trump’s rise, both because he moderated on the issue most viscerally important to the base and because he dismissed the resulting anger of the grassroots. By campaigning as one thing and governing as another, this thinking goes, certain Republicans invited voters to take drastic measures by turning to Trump. “They’ve been promised conservative action and results, and when their leaders are in office, they come up with excuses not to deliver,” McIntosh says. “You could use Flake as an example of that.”

***

By the time Trump cleared the primary field in May 2016, both Pence and Flake were staring into the political abyss. The Indiana governor had become so deeply unpopular that Cruz, whom Pence had endorsed prior to the Indiana primary, barely campaigned with him in the state. Preparing for a coin-flip reelection bid that fall, Pence’s team knew he would have to go negative—uncharacteristically so—against his Democratic opponent to stand a chance of winning. Flake, meanwhile, had seen his favorability slide sharply back home, the cumulative result of his failed immigration play, his alliance with GOP leadership and his frontal assault on Trump, who dominated the Arizona primary.

The vice presidential selection changed everything. Pence and Flake had stayed close after leaving the House; the governor would always visit the senator whenever they were both in D.C., the senator and his wife made plans to spend a weekend at the governor’s mansion, and the two politicians exchanged constant emails and text messages. But then Flake—who never believed Pence was being seriously considered as Trump’s running mate since the governor had gone radio silent during the process—found himself dazed to learn from news reports what had seemed impossible: that Pence, the most decent man in politics, was joining forces with Trump, the most indecent man in politics.

Flake’s decision to skip the convention stung Pence, the vice president’s friends say, and the relationship never recovered. Once, when Pence swung through Arizona for a campaign rally, Flake refused to attend—but asked his old mate for a meeting at the airport. Pence obliged. “It was a little awkward,” Flake recalls of their short visit. Another time, when Pence visited a church in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, the senator texted to remind him that he would be campaigning less than a mile from Flake’s home. “Can you help me trim some hedges?” Flake asked. Pence replied: “As long as we can carve in ‘Trump-Pence’ in the hedge.” Flake says he texted him back: “Small hedge. Only have room for ‘Pence.’” How did Pence respond? “Ha, ha.”

Even as Flake came to view Pence’s selection as a good thing, offering stability and normalcy to a campaign that had neither, he realized their relationship would look very different. “It has to,” Flake says. “If somebody is expecting us to get together and, you know, talk candidly about—” He pauses. “That doesn’t happen. Mike is intensely loyal. That’s a virtue. He has never uttered to me one syllable of disagreement with the president. And frankly, I admire him for that.”

From the vice president’s perspective, according to several allies who have spoken with him and relayed identical language, Pence feels angry and hurt that Flake “never gave the president a chance.” Pence had told Flake, repeatedly, that Trump is a different person in private than he is in public. And he hoped, after Election Day, that the slate would be wiped clean; that Flake would join other reluctant Republicans in giving the president-elect a fresh start. If he has always trusted my judgment, Pence grumbled to their mutual friends, why won’t he trust my judgment on partnering with Trump?

The senator arches an eyebrow when I tell him this. “We heard a very gracious speech from the president the night of the election. I thought, ‘Hey, there’s gonna be a pivot here,’” Flake says. “But we didn’t see much evidence of that after that speech. And then we came to the inauguration and it’s ‘American carnage.’ That kind of set the tone.”

Flake wanted to bite his tongue but could not. Whether it was style (early morning incendiary tweets) or substance (free-trade pullback, travel ban), the senator felt obliged to sound the alarms on Trump’s presidency.

Knowing that his career was at risk—Trump and his team were promising to defeat him in 2018—Flake went all-in, writing a book to articulate the dangers of Trumpism and the decline of principle. (“Rather than fighting the populist wave that threatened to engulf us, rather than defending the enduring principles that were consonant with everything that we knew and had believed in, we pretended that the emperor wasn’t naked,” Flake wrote. “Even worse: We checked our critical faculties at the door and pretended that the emperor was making sense.”) The book, which eliminated any chance of reconciling with the pro-Trump base in Arizona, was met with mixed reviews. Many on the left and the center-right applauded Flake’s courage and clarity, while most on the right scoffed at the notion that the senator was in any position to lecture on the drift of conservatism.

Trent Franks, the recently resigned Arizona congressman and a longtime friend to both Pence and Flake, measured his words when discussing the two men. “We have had some enormous departures, politically, in recent years,” Franks says. “And I have to say, in my own judgment, that it reflects primarily Jeff moving and not Mike moving. We’ve been disappointed with some of the things Jeff’s done politically.”

Flake doesn’t deny that he became a different lawmaker when he transitioned to the Senate, but says that transformation is nothing compared with what he has seen from the GOP itself. “In the House, frankly, it is much easier to vote ‘no’ and hope ‘yes.’ … It’s easier to cast an ideological vote,” Flake says, citing his opposition to the bank bailout, which he now says was irresponsible as the economy teetered on the brink of collapse. That said, Flake continues, “The bigger change was the party, which used to be the party of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, free trade. It has become a more nationalist, nativist, anti-immigration party. And that’s an unfamiliar standard for most of us. Some have adapted. And I haven’t.”

The old allies aren’t exactly estranged. Pence gave Flake’s son a tour of the West Wing at the White House Christmas party, and back in June, Flake snapped a photo on his iPhone as their wives reunited at the White House picnic. But it’s nothing like their heyday in the House, when one man could always be found at the other’s side. “I think that would be tough for him to explain to the president,” Flake says, grinning, “‘I was out with Flake last night.’” Whatever personal affection may have been lost, a political bond endures: At their November dinner, as the vice president pressed the senator for his vote, Flake made an offer: In exchange for backing the GOP tax bill, he wanted a promise that the White House would “enact fair and permanent protections for DACA recipients.” Pence made the commitment then and there. Flake, in turn, voted to secure the administration’s first major legislative victory.

This fleeting alliance aside, in the age of Trump, a pair of conjoined political twins has been separated: Flake heading home, his star now dimmed, and Pence preparing for the possibility of succeeding Trump atop the Republican Party, be it in 2024, 2020 or potentially even sooner.

“We’ve taken different paths, but I’m not trying to suggest that mine is a more virtuous path than his. He’s in a position with considerably more power than I have, and there’s something to be said for that,” Flake says as our interview winds down. “If he can influence the president in a positive direction, then maybe that was a wise choice.”