Donald Trump “handed down a death sentence to Mike Pence” because he knew “the only way to get what he wanted” was for the “worst possible events to unfold” during the insurrection, according to his niece, Mary Trump.
“We need to be very blunt about what happened,” she told Katie Phang on MSNBC Friday. Trump “wasn’t just stirring up his insurrectionists to create chaos,” she said. “He handed down a death sentence to Mike Pence.”
Trump said that once Pence defied the former president and refused to overturn the election, her uncle had few options left to stay in power, and may have considered something as “absolutely radical” as “declaring martial law,” which witnesses have indicated. The “death of his vice president” could have paved the way for that, she noted.
Trump told Lawrence O’Donnell the previous day on MSNBC that Trump’s vision for the insurrection took a particularly dark turn when he finally realized that someone “as weak and sycophantic as Mike Pence” had the “audacity” to go against him.
That’s something “Donald isn’t going to take,” Trump said. “What people need to understand is that Donald doesn’t believe he should be denied anything he wants.”
That’s when the former president knew “the only way for him to get what he wanted was for the worst possible events to unfold in the Capitol,” she said.
The violent mob that stormed the Capitol was calling to hang Mike Pence that day and came as close as 40 feet from him.
Despite the dire peril Pence was subjected to by his boss and his likely “abject terror,” Mary Trump does not consider the former vice president a hero for certifying the electoral vote despite the then-president’s demands.
“Mike Pence is not a hero. He did the right thing on January 6th but only after exploring every way to avoid doing so,” she tweeted Thursday. “He doesn’t even have the guts to testify in front of the committee.”