FORTY-SEVEN
Pelosi and Schumer jointly called Pence the morning of January 7 to urge him to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows for “the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments” to issue a declaration to Congress that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Such action would enable the vice president to “immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
“I don’t think he’s coming to the phone. Somebody’s not telling him,” Pelosi told her aides. She thought his likely unwillingness to talk punctuated his weakness.
Pence did not take the call. Short instead called Schumer’s chief of staff, Michael Lynch, to ask why they were calling. Short wanted to insulate Pence from any attempt to remove Trump from office.
“What’s the context here? How can I be helpful?” Short asked Lynch as the leaders of congressional Democrats remained on hold.
“They kept us on hold for 25 minutes and then said the vice president wouldn’t come on the phone,” Schumer said later.
“If the VP takes the call, then they go to the sticks,” Short told colleagues, referring to the microphones inside the Capitol, “and say we’ve spoken with the vice president about invoking the 25th, putting the VP in an incredibly awkward position.”
Pence never considered resigning or invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Greg Jacob advised him that the 25th Amendment was designed to be used if a president was incapacitated and this situation, however bad, did not meet that criterion. Pence agreed.
Pence worked the entire day from his residence and did not go to the White House. He did not speak with Trump, who was facing resignation calls from some Republicans and even the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, the wife of Mitch McConnell, resigned, saying she was “deeply troubled” by the events of January 6. Barr said in a statement that Trump orchestrated a “mob to pressure Congress” and called his conduct a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”
Later Thursday, Pence called his lawyer, Richard Cullen, and thanked him for his guidance. He said he was sitting at the residence with Mrs. Pence.
“What was it like?” Cullen asked.
Cullen could hear Pence turn to his wife. “Honey, were we scared?” He could not hear her answer.
“I’m praying for the president,” Pence said.I
Graham saw that revenge was a very hard thing for Trump to give up. For Trump’s sake, and everyone’s, Graham hoped the difference with Pence would not keep consuming the president.
Later, at the airport, Graham was shouted at and trailed by Trump supporters. “Traitor! Traitor!” they screamed at Graham as he walked through the terminal, staring down at his phone.
“Did you take an oath?” one man shouted.
“I did,” Graham said.
“Well, you pissed on that oath.”
Security took him to a holding room where Pence called to thank him for his kind words on the Senate floor about the vice president’s son and son-in-law.
Graham believed Trump’s treatment of Pence was one of the worst things Trump had done. Any sensible Democrat, Graham believed, now understood Trump had inflicted a lot of damage to himself and the best strategy was to get out of the way as Trump mowed down those closest to him.
Graham told Trump, “This has made every critic more right than wrong.” He later observed, “I don’t think he realizes to this day the effect of his words.”
I just had the most unbelievable, unsettling experience, Congressman Adam Smith said in an 11:30 a.m. call on January 8 to Chairman Milley.
Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was a 24-year congressional veteran from Washington State. A moderate Democrat, little known and no headline grabber. But in military and Pentagon circles, he was a powerful, behind-the-scenes lawmaker.
Smith, 55, described sitting in the aisle seat in row 26 on the Alaska Airlines 5 p.m. flight out of Washington Reagan National Airport to Seattle on the day after the insurrection at the Capitol. He was surrounded by what looked like nearly 100 MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporters.
A regular on the nearly six-hour flight returning home on weekends or congressional recesses, Smith had noticed the plane had been mostly empty during the last year due to the pandemic. But this time he was lucky to get a seat. As the crowd grew loud, no one seemed to realize this man who looked like a friendly business traveler was a congressman.
Ugly talk about conspiracies to steal the election from Trump filled the plane. So did chatter about the QAnon group, which passengers said with confidence was a bulwark against a cabal of cannibalistic, anti-Trump pedophiles who worship Satan and run a global child-sex-trafficking ring.
Several passengers also mentioned “6MWE.” Smith did not know what they were talking about. He was horrified to learn, listening as some passengers explained and discussed openly that it meant “6 million weren’t enough,” a reference to the 6 million Jews exterminated in Nazi concentration camps.
They voiced deep disappointment that the riot had not overturned the presidential election. This was the final struggle for a new order. Heads nodded.
Smith, sitting silent with a mask, felt it was like being in the losing locker room after a game. They voiced such dejection that they made Smith, momentarily, feel good. The country’s just gone to hell, they said, it’s horrible, a terrible place.
America was so bad, so lost, one young man said, “I’m just going to move to South Korea.”
South Korea? Smith thought to himself, confused. Why? The young man answered Smith’s unvoiced question, telling other passengers, “South Korea is 90 percent Christian.” In actuality, South Korea is 29 percent Christian.
“You should move to Idaho,” suggested one woman.
“I just don’t think they have decent seafood in Idaho,” the young man replied.
Smith thought that this young man wanted a fascist takeover of the United States, but at the end of the day, if he couldn’t get decent sushi, it just might not be worth it.
The rioters at the Capitol the day before had to come from somewhere, but he was surprised that so many were returning to his traditionally blue state.
Smith, who had just had his first vaccine shot, sat with his mask on, not saying a word as the raw chatter continued. If I’m ever going to catch the coronavirus, he thought, this would be the time.
In the middle seat next to him a small woman, about 50 years old and decked out in Trump paraphernalia, clearly had the same thought. She was intensely wiping down her seat area.
As Armed Services chairman, a number of members had come to him, since January 6, voicing concern about the security of the top secret nuclear launch codes. Trump had them. Was there some way to contain the president? Smith had passed along those concerns to Speaker Pelosi.
One member of Congress said he was worried that Trump was going to steal Air Force One in his last days, fly it to Moscow and sell U.S. secrets to Putin. Another concern from members was that the Capitol would come under attack during Biden’s inauguration. How could they make sure Trump didn’t stop law enforcement forces from protecting Biden?
As the flight progressed across the country, white supremacist and anti-Semitic talk continued unabated. It was one thing to read about and talk about something all day, but another to sit there for hours in the middle of it. The experience was jarring, like the riot itself. Smith was convinced many on this flight, and at the Capitol, absolutely tried to overturn the election of a legitimately elected president. No doubt.
But Smith also felt the riot had an element of reality being suspended. It was like someone tried to kick a 90-yard field goal in football. Is such an unrealistic play an attempted field goal? You could call it that, sure, but it was impossible. Trump and his supporters weren’t going to overturn a legitimate election, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try. Hail Mary.
Smith liked to think of Donald Trump as a hundred-year flood in American democracy. But he told colleagues there was nothing Congress could put into law to protect the country if a lunatic wound up in the White House. The war-making power was ceded to the president as commander in chief. The only power Congress had, in a practical sense, was to cut off the money. He believed the system for controlling the use of nuclear weapons was vulnerable.
“The focus needs to be making sure that we don’t let a lunatic back into the White House,” Smith said. “Two hundred years of history teaches us the president of the United States uses the military the way he wants.
“Trump is mentally unstable,” he said. “He’s a narcissistic psychopath. The great fear was that he would use the Pentagon and the Department of Defense basically to stage a coup.”
It was a conclusion, startling and grim, that ricocheted around Congress on January 8. A day before, Trump had issued a video saying, “a new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th,” and said he wanted a “smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.” But the video was muted, flat, and insincere. It reassured few members.
“My fear with Trump was always that he was going to engineer a fascist takeover of the country,” Smith said. “I never really worried that he would start a war. He’s a coward. He doesn’t want that level of responsibility.”
I. See Prologue for more on Milley’s role on January 8, 2021, pages xiii-xxviii.