Trump said Pence would ‘go down as a wimp’ in Jan. 6 call, book reveals
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.
Pence and Trump fell out over Jan,. 6, leading the vice president to run for the White House himself in 2024.
Pence did face great danger on Jan. 6. A former Situation Room officer interviewed by ABC more than a year ago said Pence came “close” to being killed during the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“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 in May 2024 with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We started running through all of these game plans because it was getting close.”
