Mike Pence

Pence was born on June 7, 1959, in Columbus, Indiana, the third son of Ann Jane "Nancy" Cawley and Edward Joseph Pence Jr., who ran a group of gas stations. His father served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and received the Bronze Star in 1953, which Pence displays in his office along with its commendation letter and a reception photograph. His father was of German and Irish descent, and his mother is of Irish ancestry. His paternal grandfather, Edward Joseph Pence Sr., worked in the Chicago stockyards. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Richard Michael Cawley, who emigrated from Dooncastle, Ireland, to the United States through Ellis Island and who became a bus driver in Chicago, Illinois. His maternal grandmother's parents were from Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland.

Pence graduated from Columbus North High School in 1977. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Hanover College in 1981, and a Juris Doctor from the Robert H. McKinney School of Law at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis in 1986. While at Hanover, he joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, becoming the chapter president. After graduating from Hanover, he was an admissions counselor at the college from 1981 to 1983.

In his childhood and early adulthood, Pence was a Roman Catholic and a Democrat, as was the rest of his family. He volunteered for the Bartholomew County Democratic Party in 1976 and voted for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, and has said he was originally inspired to get involved in politics by people such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. While in college, Pence left the Catholic Church and became an evangelical, born-again Christian, to the disappointment of his mother. His political views also started shifting to the right during this time, something which Pence attributes to the "conservatism of Ronald Reagan" with which he began to identify.

After graduating from law school in 1986, Pence was an attorney in private practice. In 1988, he ran for Congress against Democratic incumbent Philip Sharp, but lost. He ran against Sharp again in 1990, quitting his job in order to work full-time in the campaign, but once again was unsuccessful. During the race, Pence used "political donations to pay the mortgage on his house, his personal credit card bill, groceries, golf tournament fees and car payments for his wife". While the spending was not illegal at the time, it reportedly undermined his campaign.

During the 1990 campaign, Pence ran a television advertisement in which an actor, dressed in a robe and headdress and speaking in a thick Middle Eastern accent, thanked his opponent, Sharp, for doing nothing to wean the United States off imported oil as chairman of a House subcommittee on energy and power. In response to criticism, Pence's campaign responded that the advertisement was not about Arabs; rather, it concerned Sharp's lack of leadership. In 1991, Pence wrote an essay published in the Indiana Policy Review in which he apologized for running negative ads against Sharp. Pence vowed to refrain from using insulting speech or running ads that belittle his adversaries. Also taking place in 1991, he became the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, a self-described free-market think tank and a member of the State Policy Network, a position he held until 1993.

Shortly after his first congressional campaign in 1988, radio station WRCR-FM in Rushville, Indiana, hired Pence to host a weekly half-hour radio show, Washington Update with Mike Pence. In 1992, Pence began hosting a daily talk show on WRCR, The Mike Pence Show, in addition to a Saturday show on WNDE in Indianapolis. Pence called himself "Rush Limbaugh on decaf" since he considered himself politically conservative while not as bombastic as Limbaugh. Beginning on April 11, 1994, Network Indiana syndicated The Mike Pence Show statewide. The program reached as many as 18 radio stations in Indiana, including WIBC in Indianapolis. From 1995, Pence also hosted a weekend public affairs TV show likewise titled The Mike Pence Show on Indianapolis TV station WNDY. Pence ended his radio and television shows in 1999 to focus on his 2000 campaign for Congress, which he eventually won.

Soon after the election, he was appointed chairman of President-elect Trump's transition team. During the transition phase of the Trump administration, Pence was reported as holding a large degree of influence in the administration due to his roles as a mediator between Trump and congressional Republicans, for reassuring conservatives about Trump's conservative credentials, and his influence in determining Donald Trump's cabinet.

On January 20, 2017, at noon, Pence became the 48th vice president of the United States, sworn into the office by justice Clarence Thomas. Pence became the first vice president to be sworn in by an African-American justice of the Supreme Court.

On the first day in office (January 20), Pence performed various ceremonial duties, including swearing in Jim Mattis as United States secretary of defense and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security. He also administered the oath of office to the White House senior staff on January 22, 2017.

Pence also sat in on calls made by President Trump to foreign heads of government and state such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

In January, Pence appointed Josh Pitcock as his chief of staff, whom he had known from his gubernatorial and congressional days. The following month, Jarrod Agen was tapped as deputy assistant to the president and director of communications to the vice president; his previous job being chief of staff for governor of Michigan Rick Snyder through the time of the Flint water crisis. In July, Pitcock stepped down as chief of staff, and was succeeded in the position by Nick Ayers, another longtime Pence advisor.

On February 5, 2017, Pence warned Iran "not to test the resolve" of the new Trump administration following their ballistic missile tests.

On February 7, 2017, Pence, in his dual constitutional role as president of the United States Senate made the first ever tie-breaking vote to confirm a Cabinet member. He cast the deciding vote to break a fifty-fifty tie to confirm Betsy DeVos as the secretary of education. Pence cast his second tie-breaking vote on March 30, voting to advance a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. In 2018, Pence broke a tie to confirm Jonathan A. Kobes for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. This was the first-ever tie-breaking vote to confirm a judicial nominee in U.S. history. …

Pence left office on January 20, 2021, and was succeeded by the 49th vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris. Pence did not have a permanent place of residence in Indiana when he left the vice presidency. Official records indicated that Pence had not owned a residence in Indiana since 2013, having lived in the governor's mansion and then the vice president's residence in Washington. As a result, for several months after leaving office, he and his wife stayed at residences owned by various Indiana Republican politicians. It is believed that he was at one time staying in a cabin owned by his former lieutenant governor, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. In May 2021, the Pences bought a home in Carmel, Indiana.

In February 2021, it was announced that Pence would join The Heritage Foundation as a distinguished visiting fellow. He also joined the Young America's Foundation conservative youth organization, with plans to launch a new podcast with the group in the coming months. In April 2021, Pence founded a policy and advocacy organization, Advancing American Freedom. At speaking engagements in the months after the end of the Trump administration, Pence spoke with "an almost reverence" of the former president, according to one journalist.

Pence narrated a four-part television series on the career of right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh titled Age of Rush, which debuted on Fox Nation in March 2021. Pence had previously cited Limbaugh as an inspiration for his career in talk radio and then in politics. In April 2021, it was reported that Pence signed a deal with publisher Simon & Schuster for two books, including an autobiography.

The day the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, Pence told Breitbart News: "Roe v. Wade has been consigned to the ash heap of history...Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land."

Pence appeared in the July 2022 documentary Unprecedented. That same year, Pence condemned "unprincipled populism" and "Putin apologists" in the Republican Party.

Since leaving the vice presidency, Pence has distanced himself from Trump's attempts to cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election and made high-profile speeches in early nominating states. …

Pence and his wife, Karen (née Batten), met while he was in law school at Indiana University. They were married on June 8, 1985. Pence's father died in 1988, leaving his mother a widow with four grown children and two teenagers. Mike and Karen Pence have three children: Michael, Charlotte, and Audrey. Michael Pence is a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. During Pence's service in the House, his family lived in Arlington, Virginia when Congress was in session and in Columbus, Indiana, during recesses. During an interview in 2002, Pence told a reporter that he would not have dinner alone with a woman other than his wife. On May 1, 2004, Pence's mother remarried – this time to Basil Coolidge Fritsch. In 2018, Pence's oldest brother, Greg, entered and won the political race to represent Indiana's 6th congressional district in Congress (the seat previously held by Mike). Greg and Mike are similar enough in appearance that Greg once successfully acted as a decoy to lure the press away from his brother when Mike Pence was being touted as a potential running mate to Donald Trump.

In 2016 he was diagnosed with asymptomatic left bundle branch block. In April 2021, Pence underwent surgery for a pacemaker implant due to a slow heartbeat.

The family's pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo, was the subject of Marlon Bundo's A Day in the Life of the Vice President, a children's book that Pence's daughter Charlotte wrote.

Pence was raised in a Catholic family, was an altar server, and attended parochial school. He became a born-again Christian in college, while a member of a nondenominational Christian student group, and identified his first year—and specifically "a Christian music festival in Asbury, Kentucky, in the spring of 1978" referring to the Ichthus Music Festival at then Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky—as the moment he made a "commitment to Christ". After that point, Pence continued to attend Mass (where he met his wife) and was a Catholic youth minister. Pence called himself Catholic in a 1994 news piece, although by 1995, he and his family had joined an evangelical megachurch, the Grace Evangelical Church. In 2013, Pence said his family was "kind of looking for a church". In 2016, Pence and his wife regularly worshiped at College Park Church, a nondenominational church in Indianapolis. …