Details of former President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on his Vice President Mike Pence have emerged in the latter’s memoir “So Help Me God.”
Relaying what happened in the weeks before January 6, Pence describes a December 13 phone call with then-President Trump.
In the advance copy obtained by several news outlets, Pence retells how Trump attempted to convince him to delay or block the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden.
According to Pence, Trump told him — amid buzzing online chatter — that if he wanted to be “popular,” he would decline to participate in Congress’s certification of the 2020 Presidential election.
Pence recalls Trump telling him he was “trending number two on Twitter” amid speculation regarding whether or not he would participate in the January 6 proceedings.
The former Vice President detailed that as many of Trump’s supporters believed there had been widespread election fraud, the consensus was that he excludes himself from the proceedings, to which Trump “concurred.”
In the memoir, Pence recalls Trump telling him, “If you want to be popular, don’t do it.”
Pence writes that Trump “went a step further,” suggesting the then-Vice President “convene the session and then at some point walk out.”
Pence relays that Trump tells him it would be the “coolest thing” he could do and that not doing it would make him “just another RINO,” eliciting laughs from both men.
The former Vice President remembers that at the time of the call, there wasn’t any “angst” between him and Trump and neither was there “talk of rejecting electors or returning votes to the states.”
Instead, Pence highlights in the books, the bad blood only emerged in the days and weeks after the phone call.
Most of the book focuses on Trump’s policy achievements, bar the last few chapters that detail the tumultuous time leading up to January 6.
