This. Is. Insane.
Our democracy came down to Mike Pence refusing to get into an SUV with Secret Service agents that he didn’t know, it came down to a Pence phone call with Dan Quayle and Quayle saying that was absolutely nothing he could do and there was no room to even entertain Trump’s crazed theories, and – the last on the list, for now, it came down to Dan Quayle resisting Trump pouting, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore!”
According to CNN’s review [1] of Bod Woodward’s latest book, “Peril”:
“Peril” also describes the tense encounter in the Oval Office on January 5 when Trump pressured Pence to overturn the results of the election. While the showdown went on inside, the two men could hear MAGA supporters cheering and chanting outside near Pennsylvania Avenue. “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?” Trump asked. “I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” Pence said.
“But wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?” Trump asked, according to Woodward and Costa. “No,” Pence said. He went on, “I’ve done everything I could and then some to find a way around this. It’s simply not possible.” When Pence did not budge, Trump turned on him. “No, no, no!” Trump shouted, according to the authors. “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”
Pence sounds so reasonable in this passage that one wonders if the source isn’t Mike Pence? We suspect that one of the sources is Mike Pence, but trust Woodward enough to believe that he would follow it up with another independent source for corroboration. It certainly sounds like Trump. “Wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that kind of power, the kind of power to overturn a 7 million vote victory and make this country indistinguishable from Russia?” (Full quote as we would guess as to the state of Trump’s brain.)
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