Vice President Mike Pence is undertaking the critical role of offering assurance to deep-pocketed Republican elites who will be needed to finance President Donald Trump’s campaign. | AP Photo/Andrew Harnik 2020 elections Pence woos 2016 anti-Trumpers to bankroll billion-dollar reelection The vice president is serving as a conduit and Trump translator for the traditional GOP donor set.

When Vice President Mike Pence appeared before some of the GOP’s most powerful donors at the iconic Pebble Beach golf course on Monday evening, he did something that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago.

Over a surf and turf dinner, the vice president showered praise on Paul Singer, a prominent New York City hedge fund manager who spent millions of dollars in 2016 bankrolling TV ads painting Trump as “too reckless and dangerous to be president.”


But as the group of assembled Republicans — some of whom have been similarly skeptical about the president in the past — looked on, Pence praised the 74-year-old billionaire as a leading free-market thinker and thanked him for his years of financial support to the party and conservative causes.

The private dinner provides a window into a behind-the-scenes, Pence-led mission: to ensure that Republican givers who never came around to Trump in 2016 are on board for 2020. With Democrats already raking in colossal amounts of cash, Republicans estimate they’ll need to raise around $1 billion — a figure that will require the party’s donor class to be all-in. Party officials also want to deprive any would-be Trump primary challengers of the financial oxygen they’d need to mount a campaign.

As it turned out, Pence had his eye on others at Pebble Beach. That evening, the vice president met privately with Warren Stephens, a 62-year-old Arkansas investment banker who, like Singer, was among the biggest contributors to the failed effort to thwart Trump. In 2016, Stephens gave a combined $5.9 million to a pair of super PACs that spent heavily to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination.

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Pence’s appearance at Monday’s dinner was the latest in a string of overtures to the two megadonors: He also hosted Singer and Stephens at the White House for detailed briefings on the administration’s legislative agenda. And there are indications the relationship has improved.

Singer chipped in to the party’s PR campaigns to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominees, and shortly before the midterms Stephens cut a six-figure check to a pro-Trump super PAC.

While the smash-mouth president is certain to be the public face of his reelection campaign, Pence — long a favorite of conservatives — is undertaking a lower-profile but critical role of offering assurance to the deep-pocketed Republican elites who will be needed to finance Trump’s behemoth campaign apparatus.

Among those the vice president has courted is the Club for Growth, a prominent anti-tax group that in 2016 aired TV ads warning Republican primary voters that “there’s nothing conservative about Donald Trump.”

After the election the vice president began a series of discussions with Club for Growth President David McIntosh, and made an appearance at the organization’s conference at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach. Pence pledged to the group’s donors that the administration was committed to repealing Obamacare.

“What I’ve seen the vice president do is, if you will, translate Trump and what the administration stands for into language that conservatives not only feel comfortable with but embrace as the agenda they want to see,” said McIntosh, whose organization received substantial funding from Stephens in 2016.

The Club has adopted a very different posture heading into 2020, refashioning itself as a pro-Trump vehicle. Earlier this month, it launched an Iowa TV ad blitz casting Democrat Beto O’Rourke as a politician dripping with “white male privilege.”

To some, however, the donor courtship illustrates a broader problem confronting the White House: The president’s support from GOP elders remains tenuous.

“They know the whole edifice of Trump support within the party, which looks formidable, could collapse with a couple of shocks,” said Bill Kristol, a conservative commentator and Never Trump activist who’s been trying to promote the prospect of a 2020 Republican primary challenge. “Thus the rush to ‘lock up’ support.”

The reception hasn’t always been friendly. While attending an exclusive American Enterprise Institute-hosted retreat earlier this month, Pence was grilled by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the administration’s foreign policy record.

At his Pebble Beach appearance, Pence carefully tailored his appeal to the conservatives in attendance by highlighting the administration’s efforts to reshape the nation’s courts. And he gave a dire prediction of what would happen if liberals seized the White House: “The moment America becomes a socialist country is the moment America ceases to be America.”



The Pence blitz commenced after the inauguration when he began headlining policy briefings at the White House that were attended by an array of major GOP givers, including Richard Uihlein, a packaging company executive who gave $2 million to an anti-Trump super PAC.

Other attendees were from the influential Koch political network, which sat out the 2016 election. The gatherings were organized by Marc Short, who was recently named Pence’s chief of staff and formerly served as president of the Koch-backed Freedom Partners outfit.

Among the Koch network figures invited was Art Pope, a North Carolina-based funder of conservative projects who publicly refused to support Trump in 2016.

In an interview this week, Pope estimated that he’d been to the White House five times since the election. His most recent visit, he said, came earlier this year when he briefly exchanged pleasantries with the vice president.

Pope said he’d been impressed by the the outreach he’d received from the White House. It’s led him to discount the idea that Trump has a blacklist of people who opposed him.

“The conventional wisdom and the quote ‘word on the street’ in November of 2016 through spring of 2017 was that if you publicly criticized Donald Trump as a candidate, you need not apply to a position. You won’t be considered, you won’t be invited to the White House Christmas party or anything else,” said Pope. “That is not the conventional wisdom now.”

Pope said he hasn’t decided whether to donate to Trump in 2020. But he said he expected few of those who opposed Trump in the 2016 election to remain on the sidelines this time.

“The number of people who were publicly opposed or critical of President Trump during the 2016 election,” he said, “has really dwindled.”

