As rioters were storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump saw crowds of people chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and said he agreed with them, getting upset when it became clear that the vice president had been whisked to safety by the U.S. Secret Service.
According to The New York Times:
Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.
Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hung.
It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.
Of course, this shouldn’t surprise anyone who actually knows what the failed, one-term, twice-impeached former president is capable of.
For example, Trump reportedly made fun of his own father, Fred Trump, as he faded into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, as first reported back in 2017 in the book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump, the ex-president’s niece:
“Among the family drama that Trump is set to spill in the book is how the current US president ‘dismissed and derided’ his father ‘when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s,’ which he was diagnosed with in 1993, according to Simon & Schuster.”
Donald Trump is a complete asshole. He always has been, even as a child:
Dennis Burnham was four years younger and lived around the corner from Donald. He inherited his own impression of his neighbor from his mother, who warned that he should “stay away from the Trumps.”
“Donald was known to be a bully, I was a little kid, and my parents didn’t want me beaten up,” said Burnham, 65, a business consultant in Texas.
Once when she left Dennis in a playpen in a back yard adjoining the Trumps’ property, Martha Burnham returned to find Donald throwing rocks at her son. “She saw Donald standing at the fence,” Dennis Burnham said, “using the playpen for target practice.”
Should it surprise anyone that Donald was willing to see his own VP hang from a scaffold if it would allow him to remain as president indefinitely? If it does, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.