Former White House Situation Room officer Mike Stiegler revealed that then-President Donald Trump never called down to check on then-Vice President Mike Pence as Trump fans hunted him at the Capitol, and that we were “that close” to losing the VP.
On Tuesday’s edition of ABC’s Good Morning America, anchor George Stephanopoulos sat down with Stiegler, whose account of the Capitol riot is included in the host’s new book “The Situation Room.”
In a stunning exchange, Stiegler revealed just how close Pence came to getting killed — to the point of asking “Where’s the second in line?” — and that Trump never called down to the White House nerve center to ask about Pence:
Honestly kinda wish they’d have succeeded. We’d be down one monster at the hands of another; and the justice system would have handled the situation with MUCH less legal circus and kid gloves. The overall response to J6 has been a joke, and this would have forced us to take it seriously.
The only problem, though, would be that it would have permitted Trump to call in the army and implement martial law, suspending everything else until he put down the insurrection, his buddies, himself. Then? He’d never let go of the power and he would have absolutely controlled Congress through the certification.
You know good and well that he’d clear his best insurrectionists, his proud boys, to work above the law and the army, and they’d personally be the guard detail for Congress when it finally could return to certify the election. Then? It’s whatever he and his goons want.
Not sure if Pence dying would have made a difference there actually. There was already an insurrection, so if martial law is what he was after, he could have just used that as an excuse regardless of how successful the insurrectionists were.
I like to think that ‘we the people’ wouldn’t tolerate a Trump instigating an insurrection and then calling for martial law on the basis of that same insurrection; but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d have been disappointed at our collective lack of a spine.
It would have. If he didn’t certify the vote then vote goes to Congress and they would have voted trump in.
Get a clue.
The Vice President doesn’t certify the vote count, the Senate does. The VP usually presides over the counting because the VP is the head of the Senate but if the office of the VP is vacant or the VP chooses not to preside over the vote count then the president pro tempore or the Senate leader elected under SR1 is the presiding officer.
Yeah, and without Pence, it would’ve been Lindsay Graham acting as president pro tempare, and he would have gone along with the fake elector scheme as pretext to refuse to acknowledge electors from states Biden won, leaving him with less than 270 electors. Election stalemates, it goes to Congress in a one-vote-per-state contest, and Trump wins. That was the entire plan behind the coup–find a pretext to deny Biden 270 electors to throw it to the backup mechanism where Republicans outnumber Democrats.
I’m glad they failed but at least I don’t have to listen to the corporate media wax poetic about how the United States is a beacon of democracy because the president is willing to peacefully transition to the next or whatever