Trump Gave Pence 10 Minutes to Talk Before Turning on the TV, the Book said

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Former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence meet weekly for lunch. The lunches were an opportunity for Pence to tell Trump “how hard he was for her,” a new book says. Pence typically gets 10 minutes to do so before Trump turns on the TV and describes his latest grievances, according to Michael Wolff. See more stories on the Insider business page.

Former President Donald Trump’s weekly lunch with his vice president Mike Pence at the White House followed a familiar routine, according to journalist Michael Wolff’s upcoming book.

“The lunches were specifically meant to be an opportunity for Pence to tell the president exactly how hard he was for him,” Wolff wrote in an excerpt from the book “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump President” published by The Times of London. “He usually takes ten minutes to do this before Trump snaps on television and launches into his current list of grievances.”

Trump wonders how Pence “can be a‘ tough ’and a‘ square, ’” the book says, “and also, as a corollary, he treats Pence as someone who isn’t tough, as someone who, he further pointed out, can be ‘combined’. ”

But after the 2020 election, Pence refuted the argument that he, as vice president, could reject what Trump described as “destructive electoral elections” and prevent Congress from verifying the election results. The book said that the first hope of Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani was that Pence would immediately upset the election by endorsing Trump as president.

The excerpt describes their discussion on Jan. 5, a day before the uprising of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol, when Pence rejected Trump’s requests to block President Joe Biden’s election.

The two were alone together in the Oval Office after their lunch was rescheduled for a meeting, Wolff reports, and Pence listened to Trump describe the “stolen election,” but disagreed with him. The former president talked about Pence’s “heroic place in history” if he did what Trump considered right, Wolff wrote.

“Trump was still pressed, in one line he was dripping straight and he was repeating in the coming months:‘ Do you want to be a patriot or a pussy? ’” Wolff wrote. “Pence, who did not climb the bait, reiterated that, in the extreme opinion of the constitutional experts he consulted, the Constitution did not give him the authority to do what the president thought he could do.”

Last month, Pence reiterated his view that the vice president “has no such authority” to reject or return state-certified election votes and return to Trump’s continued attacks on him without mentioning the name of the former president, Insider Tom LoBianco reported.

“The truth is there’s hardly an idea that’s more non -American than the idea that someone can elect a president,” Pence told an audience gathered at the Reagan Library in California. “The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American citizens only.”

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