President Trump said former Vice President Pence would “go down as a wimp” during a call on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots, according to a new book.
“You’ll go down as a wimp,” Trump said to the former vice president, discussing the choice Pence made to not stop the certification of former President Biden’s 2020 election victory, notes Pence took on the call reportedly said.
“If you do that, I made a big mistake 5 years ago,” Trump said, according to the ex-vice president, ABC News’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl wrote in his book “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America.”
The details about the book, which comes out Tuesday, were featured in a Sunday report from ABC News.
A former Situation Room officer in that report said Pence came “close” to being killed during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“It’s important to me that we don’t forget that it did come that close, and that we did have discussions, ‘If we lose the [vice president,] if the 25th [Amendment] is invoked,’” Mike Stiegler said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We started running through all of these game plans because it was getting close.”
