- President Donald Trump has long benefited from the loyalty of his Vice President Mike Pence.
- But Trump may have pushed Pence too far this week, after he repeatedly demanded that Pence block Biden’s presidential victory certification.
- This, combined with Trump’s failure to suppress his supporters’ uprising in the Capitol building, appears to have exposed the cracks in his partnership.
- Pence is reportedly very angry with Trump, but has not yet agreed to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would remove Trump from power.
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Vice President Mike Pence has been standing between a rock and an increasingly angry president this week when Donald Trump finally turned on his vice president for his failure to engineer Trump’s reelection.
Top aides said Trump had been running out of control for weeks, but now he has directed much of his anger towards the hitherto loyal vice president.
Earlier this week, Pence endured a lunch with Trump at which he tried to explain that he had no constitutional authority to block Biden’s election victory certification. In addition, in a letter of 6 January, he told Trump: “It is my thoughtful judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution prevents me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”
The president was furious and reportedly said to Pence, “I don’t want to be your friend, I want you to be the vice president.”
Friendship openings may not have mattered so much to Pence after Wednesday, when Trump seemed at some point to turn his angry mob against the vice president.
During the rally at the White House on Wednesday, Trump told the crowd that “Mike Pence will have to pass us. And if not, it will be a sad day for our country.”
Trump also accessed Twitter to attack Pence. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. He has an absolute right to do that,” he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted by Twitter for being factually incorrect.
As the crowd walked towards the Capitol building, they erupted in a loud cry, “Where’s Mike Pence?”
It turns out that Mike Pence was in the Capitol building and had to be discovered secretly when the pro-Trump crowd arrived. He later announced again that the Biden-Harris slate had been officially certified as the winner of the 2020 election.
In the midst of the confusion, Trump also found time to stop Pence’s team boss Mark Short of the White House, apparently blaming Short for giving Pence the advice to certify Biden’s victory.
Trump is looking for someone to blame besides himself
Trump’s scapegoat like Pence is said to have deeply irritated the normally balanced VP.
Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe told reporters on Capitol Hill that he had never seen the vice president so angry. “I’ve known Mike Pence forever. I’ve never seen Pence as angry as he is today.”
“I had a long talk with him,” continued Inhofe. “He said, ‘After all the things I did for [Trump]. ‘”
A source told CNN: “It was [Trump] worried that an angry mob he commanded to march on the Capitol could hurt the vice president or his family? “
Pence had previously liked what Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, described to The Washington Post as “a lasting and close relationship with the president”, despite his clear stylistic differences and beliefs.
In the final days of his presidency, however, Trump appears to be struggling to retain friends and colleagues. In the last 24 hours alone, Secretary of Education Betsey Devos, Secretary of Transport Elaine Chao, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and officials from the Department of Commerce and the National Security Council resigned after the siege of the Capitol for pro-Trump rioters.
There were demands from the Democratic leadership to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office and make Pence temporarily take over the president’s duties. So far, Pence has refused to echo the appeal, as Insider informed, although it appears that Trump is doing his best to antagonize Pence and make him the scapegoat for his electoral defeat.
Read More: SCOOP: Pence opposes 25th Amendment efforts to remove Trump after the Capitol riot, VP advisers told Insider
“Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, giving states the chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones that they should certify in advance. The USA demands the truth! “he tweeted on Wednesday afternoon before his suspension on Twitter.
Pence also turned to Twitter for a more indirect attack on Trump and his destructive crowd.
“Peaceful protest is every American’s right, but this attack on our Capitol Hill will not be tolerated and those involved will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” he tweeted.