According to a forthcoming book, former President Donald Trump said he would not pick former Vice President Mike Pence as his running mate if he ran for the presidency in 2024.
The news was shared during an interview with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, the authors of a new book titled “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”
Trump said selecting Pence would be “totally inappropriate” and said that Pence “committed political suicide” when he refused to reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden, the book said, the Daily Beast reported.
Baker, who works for the New York Times, and Glasser, who works for the New Yorker, are husband and wife. Their book will be published next Tuesday, but several outlets received a copy.
Trump was interviewed by the reporters for the book twice in April and November of last year. His comments show how he viewed Pence’s role in certifying election results, which is ceremonial.
Despite this, Trump and the prominent fraud pushers like law professor John Eastman insisted that Pence had the ability to reject results from key states, demanding in the hours leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 riots that he do so.
But Pence refused to listen to the commands from Trump and those surrounding him, splintering the relationship between the two and leading some rioters to chant “Hang Mike Pence” while they stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Pence has since become a talking point for Trump as he appears at different rallies and events. But Pence hasn’t been quiet either, speaking on the former president’s action before the Federalist Society in February.
“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
Pence is also set to release a memoir of his time in the White House, the Guardian reported.
The cover for the book was released on Monday, and an excerpt on the back says that he was upset with the events of Jan. 6 and “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.”
It is clear that the relationship between Trump and Pence broke at the very end of their time in office together, as Baker and Glasser describe Pence’s loyalty to his commander in chief as extreme up until the riot.
“The most [he] would say of Trump was, ‘He’s like an untamed lion who came into the city,’” the book said, citing an unnamed source close to Pence. “When this person expressed pointed criticism, the vice-president would simply reply, ‘Well, we’re praying for him.’”
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