Donald Trump Bullied Mike Pence With All-Too-Familiar Word Before Capitol Riot: NYT

The president reportedly reached deep into his strong-arm arsenal in a failed effort to arm-twist the vice president into overturning the election.
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Donald Trump went full-schoolyard in trying to bully Mike Pence before the vice president was to oversee the Electoral College vote count, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

“You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” Trump told Pence in a last-ditch pitch pressuring the vice president to overturn the election on the fallacy that a veep has the power to do so, according to the Times, which cited two unnamed sources.

Pence defied Trump, prompting the president to blast him in an incendiary speech that helped instigate the Capitol riot. Some of the pro-Trump insurrectionists yelled “Hang Pence,” video showed.

Pence, who was in the Senate presiding over the electoral vote count when the extremists stormed the Capitol, was rushed with his family into the basement. Trump neither called to check on his safety nor discouraged the rioters from attacking the veep, according to NBC News,

Pence on Tuesday refused to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. But his rift with the president seems to persist.

He was invited to the West Wing for a meeting with Trump on Monday.

“The official description of the hourlong conversation was ‘good’; the unofficial description was ‘nonsubstantive’ and ‘stilted,’” the Times wrote.

Trump, of course, infamously used the word “pussy” in a tape that leaked just before the 2016 election. He was caught bragging to Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” that he could use his celebrity to grab women by the genitals.

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