Vice President of the United States from 2017 to 2021
Michael Richard "Mike" Pence (born June 7, 1959) is an American politician and attorney. He served, from 2017 to 2021 as the 48th vice president of the United States. He also served from 2013 to 2017 as the 50th governor of Indiana, represented Indiana's 2nd congressional district and Indiana's 6th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013, and served as chairman of the House Republican Conference from 2009 to 2011. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pence led the White House Coronavirus Task Force. After Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, he refused to use his position as Vice President to decertify the results and rejected arguments from the Trump administration that he had a constitutional authority to do so. He started a campaign in the Republican Party primaries for the 2024 United States presidential election, but suspended it before voting began and endorsed Trump.
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It really is good to be back with all the patriots in the NRA, men and women who stand on the ramparts of freedom, defending all the God-given liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States every day [...] With your support, the Trump-Pence administration championed freedom for four remarkable years, and every single day we stood without apology for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
We believe we have the testing today around the country that would allow any state in America to move into phase one if they've met the other criteria: fourteen days of consistent declines and strong hospital capacity, so that their system would not be overwhelmed in the event of a flare-up. But we’re going to be working with governors tomorrow on the subject of testing and supplies. And as the President said again this evening: We’re here to help. We’ve forged a partnership with governors around the country, and tomorrow we’ll be building on that partnership to hopefully arrive at the day that we can make sure governors around the nation have the best advice and the best resources to put America back to work.
I mean, right after a time where we’re going through a pandemic that lost 22 million jobs at the height, we’ve already added back 11.6 million jobs, because we had a president who cut taxes, rolled back regulation, unleashed American energy, fought for free and fair trade, and secured $4 trillion from the Congress of the United States to give direct payments to families, save 50 million jobs through the Paycheck Protection Program. We literally have spared no expense to help the American people and the American worker through this. …
Remember that, a month ago, we had done 80,000 coronavirus tests in America. This weekend, we cleared more than 4 million. And we’re currently testing more than a million Americans a week. We fully expect to actually have tested more than 5 million Americans before the end of this month. But at the President's urging, we’re going to continue to scale that testing and then work with governors to make sure that they can manage and implement and deploy that testing in the manner that will most support their efforts to move their states forward. Remember that the testing that is contemplated in the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, for phase one, are testing people that have symptoms that may be coronavirus, and then also having the testing resources to deploy to vulnerable communities: nursing homes or other vulnerable communities that we have identified as needing additional –what is called "monitoring" or "surveillance testing".