Former Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday told ABC’s “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir that former President Donald Trump’s Twitter attack on him was “reckless.”
On January 6, 2021, the day on which a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the electoral college for the 2020 presidential election, Trump held a rally at which he urged his followers to go to the Capitol and repeatedly said he hoped that Mike Pence would “do the right thing,” which allegedly meant that as President of the Senate, the VP would annul the results from battle states that favored Democrat Joe Biden, and register and “alternate” list of delegates, giving Trump the presidency.
Many of Trump’s listeners marched to the Capitol and stormed it, and a Reuters photographer testified he had overheard three rioters saying they wanted to catch Pence and hang him. Many others at the event chanted they wanted to hang Pence.
“I mean, the president’s words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem,” Pence told Muir. Pence said he was angry that Trump said he “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
“I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and I said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law,'” Pence told Muir.
Pence’s memoir, “So Help Me God,” is being released on Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. Here is a segment from the official preview:
This is the inside story of the Trump administration by its second-highest official—what he said to the president and how he was tested. The relationship begins in Indiana when Pence sees how Trump connects with working-class voters. After the election, the vice president comes to appreciate how Trump maintains that connection through unvarnished tweets and how his unorthodox style led to historic breakthroughs, from tax cuts to trade deals, from establishing the United States Space Force to the first new peace agreement in the Middle East in more than twenty-five years. This is the most robust defense of the Trump record of anyone who served in the administration.
But it is also about the private moments when Pence pushed back forcefully, how he navigated through the Mueller investigation, his damage control after Charlottesville, and his work on healing racial rifts after the murder of George Floyd. Pence was at the forefront when “history showed up” in the form of a devastating pandemic, and he provides a detailed account of leading the task force that circumvented bureaucracies to slow the disease in its tracks. Yes, it sometimes involved brokering peace between a president with an itchy Twitter finger and an agitated New York governor, but above all, it meant giving states and America’s eager entrepreneurs the power to come up with the solutions we needed. The result was the fastest development of life-saving vaccines in history.
