Did Trump Think His Mob Had Taken Pence Hostage?
Was his tweet a call to “take out” Pence?
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What if Donald Trump actually hoped that his mob would murder Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi?
What if he believed such a crime would create a crisis big enough to let him declare a state of emergency, shut down the government for a transition period through that emergency, and retain his position as President moving into the new year?
Senator Tommy Tuberville told Politico that he told Trump, “Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,” but there’s no indication on the current public record that Trump understood that “they just took the vice president out” meant that Pence had been taken to safety.
“They…just took [him] out” could have been taken by Trump to mean the mob had taken Pence, just as easily as it could mean the Capitol Police had saved Pence from the mob.
It’s entirely possible Trump thought Tuberville was telling him that the mob had just seized Vice President Pence and was hustling him off to the sturdy gallows they’d built on the Capitol lawn.
In fact, Trump almost immediately tweeted, after talking to Tuberville: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify, USA demands the truth!”
That doesn’t sound like Trump’s relieved that Pence was just taken to safety, things would restart, and Joe Biden would be certified as president.
What if Trump believed that Pence had been “neutralized” at that point in the process of counting the electoral votes, that the count was stopped, and that Pence would soon be dead?
Could this tweet have been his call for his allies in Congress, now that the VP was out of the picture and they were in charge, to throw the count back to the House of Representatives, where in the past he had repeatedly asserted (probably correctly) that Republicans there would give him the presidency per the 12th Amendment like in 1876?
