Donald Trump will not pick Mike Pence as his running mate if he runs for the presidency again, according to an interview with the authors of a new book on his time in the White House.
“It would be totally inappropriate,” Trump told Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. “Mike committed political suicide” by refusing to reject electoral college votes in Trump’s 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, Trump said.
Baker, of the New York Times, and Glasser, of the New Yorker, are the husband-and-wife team behind The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, which will be published next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
The authors interviewed Trump twice for their book, in April and November last year.
As vice-president, Pence filled a purely ceremonial role regarding the certification of electoral results.
Alleging electoral fraud, if without evidence, Trump and advisers prominently including the law professor John Eastman demanded Pence reject results from key states.
After consulting advisers of his own, including the conservative judge J Michael Luttig and the former vice-president Dan Quayle, Pence refused to cooperate with Trump’s scheme.
The Capitol was then stormed by a mob Trump knew to be armed yet told to “fight like hell” to stop certification. As his supporters attacked, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution”.
Some rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence”. A gallows was erected outside. As described by the House January 6 committee, Pence and his Secret Service detail narrowly escaped the attackers.
In testimony to the committee, a former Trump aide said his then chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told another senior aide Trump “thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think [the rioters are] doing anything wrong.”
Whether Pence did commit “political suicide”, as Trump claims to Baker and Glasser, remains an open question.
Pence has maintained his position on the certification process. In Florida in February, he told the conservative Federalist Society: “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
But in a Republican party dominated by Trump, any presidential hopeful must balance fealty with moves towards a run of his or her own.
In polling regarding Republican nominees in 2024, Trump enjoys clear leads over challengers led by Ron DeSantis, the Trumpist Florida governor.
Pence is generally back in the pack, scoring in single digits along with names Trump might yet consider for a new running mate, the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley prominent among them.
Like Noem and Haley, Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, has presidential ambitions of his own. But Scott has also refused to dismiss the notion of joining Trump’s ticket.
On Monday, the cover of Pence’s own White House memoir was revealed. In back-cover text, Pence says he was “angry at what I saw” on January 6, “how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else”.
As reported by Axios, however, “much of the book is about Pence’s faith journey” and his “behind-the-scenes policy pushes”.
In their book, Baker and Glasser also describe Pence’s extreme loyalty to Trump before the Capitol riot, a stance he did not abandon even as Trump frequently discussed replacing him on the ticket in 2020.
Citing an unnamed person who worked with Pence, the authors write: “The most [he] would say of Trump was, ‘He’s like an untamed lion who came into the city.’
“When this person expressed pointed criticism, the vice-president would simply reply, ‘Well, we’re praying for him.’”
