- President Donald Trump did not speak to Vice President Mike Pence for several days after the siege of the Capitol.
- Pence was in the building at the time of the uprising and was targeted by the pro-Trump mob over his refusal to interfere with the certification of the outcome of the presidential election, a point that Trump himself has brought to his followers several times .
- Trump actually targeted Pence during the siege, tweeting, “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what needed to be done to protect our country” when his supporters stormed the building.
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As a crowd of Trump supporters staged a violent uprising at the Capitol on Wednesday, President Donald Trump tweeted – not in support of the hundreds of lawmakers trapped in the building, but against Vice President Mike Pence.
As hundreds of his followers violently entered the Capitol, Trump took a few moments during the siege to attack the vice president, making it clear last month that he did not support the president’s unfounded allegations of election fraud. do not dispute the certification of the election.
‘Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what needed to be done to protect our country and our Constitution, and gave the States the chance to confirm a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones they had previously asked for to confirm. US demands the truth! “President Trump wrote at 14:24 when the pro-Trump mob invaded the building.
Earlier in the day, he discussed the vice president during a rally with supporters at the Ellipse and put the success or failure of his plan to contest the election on Pence’s shoulders.
“Mike Pence will have to go through for us,” Trump told the crowd. “And if that does not happen, it will be a sad day for our country.”
Trump’s words led to Pence becoming the enemy. Several insurgents shared online that they were hoping to kill or injure the vice president, and chants of ‘hang Mike Pence’ could be heard throughout the Capitol building.
Pence was safely chased off the floor of the Senate by the Secret Service and was hidden in a safe place for the duration of the attack, which left five people, including one police officer, dead.
“At the time of the evacuation, he was determined to stay inside the building and not be taken away,” Staff Chief of Staff Marc Short told Insider on Friday. “He did not want us to feel that this was happening in our country.”
Trump’s silent treatment of Pence is ‘unscrupulous, even for the president’
The president and vice president have had a relatively good relationship until recently – which Tim Phillips, president of the libertarian group of Americans for prosperity, described to The Washington Post as “a lasting, close relationship”, despite their distinct stylistic differences and beliefs.
But as Trump slipped further and further into the unfounded belief that there was widespread election fraud, the gap between Pence and Trump widened. Trump mistakenly believed Pence had the ability to change the election, while Pence blunted in an 11-page letter sent to the president just before Wednesday’s protest and riot.
“It is my judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution limits me to claiming unilateral authority to determine which ballots should be counted and which should not,” Pence wrote.
In the days after the siege, Trump, who was probably still fooling around with what he considered Pence’s infidelity, made no attempt to contact the vice president, according to Reuters.
It did not go down well with assistants, one of whom told the Wall Street Journal that it was ‘unscrupulous, even for the president’, to avoid the vice president.
But while Trump gave Pence the silent treatment (in part perhaps because his Twitter account was permanently suspended), House Democrats addressed the VP and asked him to call for the 25th amendment. The closest to Pence spelled out the move as a non-starter and told Business Insider that Pence is doing everything in its power to avoid a further rift within the Republican Party.
Joe Grogan, the former head of the Home Affairs Council under Trump, told The Journal he believes Pence should get credit for closing the president’s demands for election fraud.
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“If he had been replaced by someone as grumpy as the people who have been the president’s most important adviser in recent months, we could have had even more carnage,” Grogan said. “Imagine what would have happened if Pence had been cunning and mean and would not have stood up for the Constitution.”
On Monday, five days after the siege of the Capitol, Trump and Pence finally met face-to-face. Despite the fact that Trump did not reach out in the days after the riots in the Capitol building, it appears that Pence has once again taken up the mantle of loyal vice president. The couple described a “good conversation” by observers, who said the vice president and president look back on their achievements over the course of their term.
As Trump dispatches a second possible indictment, he may realize how important it is to have Pence on his side.