Vice President Pence is reportedly working to win over Republican donors who opposed President Trump in 2016.
On Monday evening, Pence met for dinner with donors including hedge fund manager Paul Singer and Arkansas investment banker Warren Stephens, both of whom previously donated heavily to efforts seeking to keep Trump from winning the Republican nomination, according to Politico.
{mosads}Pence has also lobbied organizations such as the anti-tax Club for Growth, which aired anti-Trump ads in the 2016 primaries.
“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,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh told the publication.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was reportedly less receptive to Pence, blasting Trump’s foreign policy to Pence’s face at the March American Enterprise Summit in Georgia and saying the administration’s approach “looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.”
Pence has been working to woo Trump-skeptical Republicans since shortly after Trump’s inauguration, according to Politico, hosting policy briefings attended by donors to anti-Trump super PACs and figures associated with the Koch political network, which did not lobby for either candidate in 2016.
“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,” Art Pope, a Koch-associated donor who withheld support from Trump in 2016, told Politico. “That is not the conventional wisdom now.”