Donald Trump had been warned: pushing Mike Pence to reverse the results of the presidential election would be illegal. But he did it anyway.
On January 6, 2021, the Capitol was invaded by supporters of Donald Trump, angry with the defeat of their candidate. For weeks, the incumbent president refused to accept his defeat and showered them with baseless accusations of electoral fraud and conspiracy theories. And it was almost fatal for his vice president: according to information revealed during the hearings of the commission of inquiry into the invasion of the Capitol, the rioters were in a corridor 12 meters from Mike Pence, evacuated from urgency in the face of the irruption of the pro-Trump in the building, some of which chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. They resented him because, as he had criticized Donald Trump in public and in private, he intended to respect his constitutional function and certify the results of the November election – and therefore the defeat. In front of the Capitol, some had even installed a wooden gallows, a chilling symbol of the violence of some of the billionaire’s supporters – and of the resentment that the latter still retains.
Mike Pence spent nearly five hours in a secure location in the basement of the Capitol, waiting for the alert to be lifted before he could get out. The danger was real, according to the ‘New York Times’: an anonymous witness, a member of the far-right Proud Boys group, told investigators that if the rioters had been able, they would have killed Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, the president Democrat from the House of Representatives, whose office was searched and a computer stolen. “I could hear the din of rioters in the building. I didn’t realize they were that close,” recalled Greg Jacob, Mike Pence’s lawyer, who was by his side on January 6, 2021, on Thursday. “The vice president’s life was in danger” , confirmed Pete Aguilar, elected Democrat of California.
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The idea of relying on Mike Pence was apparently born in December 2020, in the face of the multiplication of the failures of the legal actions of the Trump campaign. No sufficient evidence of electoral fraud could be brought before the courts, which rejected these requests for annulment. Those close to Donald Trump, who for some fed his refusal of defeat like his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani or the lawyer John Eastman, had therefore imagined asking the vice-president to oppose the certification of the results, which he leads as President of the Senate. An illegal assumption, as testified by the lawyers of the White House: “You will cause riots in the street”, remembered having said Eric Herschmann to John Eastman. But they persisted.
“Our democracy has come dangerously close to disaster”
In the days preceding January 6, Donald Trump had thus increased the pressure on the shoulders of Mike Pence, whom he had described on the telephone as a “wimp”, according to one of his former assistants, Nick Luna. Ivanka Trump, daughter and close adviser of the American president, had also noticed “a different tone”. A polite way to discuss the relationship between Donald Trump and Mike Pence since according to Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, the first also used “the P word” – “pussy”, in English. “Hopefully Mike will do the right thing. I hope. I hope. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win,” continued Donald Trump, galvanizing the crowd in a speech delivered a few hours before the invasion of the Capitol. “I hope Mike will have the courage to do what he has to do,” he said to the applause of his audience.
But a few hours later, Mike Pence acted according to the Constitution: he certified the results of the presidential election, facing the elected representatives of the House of Representatives and the Senate together, despite the latest attempts by some Republicans to oppose it. . According to Greg Jacob, Mike Pence preferred to remain in the Capitol, despite the proximity of the rioters, rather than returning to his official residence: “The vice president did not want the world to see the vice president of the United States fleeing Capitol. He was determined to finish the job we had planned to do that day.” “Today is a dark day in the history of the Capitol,” Mike Pence said at the reopening of the session. “We are lucky to have been able to count on the courage of Mike Pence. Our democracy has come dangerously close to disaster,” Bennie Thompson, elected Democrat from Mississippi and chairman of the commission of inquiry, summed up on Thursday. Unlike Donald Trump, Mike Pence attended Joe Biden’s inauguration two weeks later, honoring the tradition of a peaceful transition of power in Kamala Harris.