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Former Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday that he was angered by President Donald Trump’s conduct on and before Jan. 6, 2021, but he took pains to avoid attacking him as Trump geared up for a presidential campaign and Pence considers one of his own.
During a 30-minute interview in New York City as he promoted his new book, “So Help Me God,” Pence deflected questions about Mr. Trump’s character and declined to say whether the former president should be elected again but suggested that he would not be supporting Trump in the Republican primary season.
“I think we’ll have better choices,” Pence said.
Asked how he responded to Trump defending the people who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol that day last year and suggesting that those who were arrested were “political prisoners,” Pence answered: “It is the reason why I decided that we should just go our separate ways.”
Recounting that he and Trump had several conversations in the final days of the presidency following the storming of the Capitol and in the few months after they left the White House, Pence suggested that their relationship was now dead. And he made clear that he was angry that Trump endangered Pence’s family that day with his inflammatory language about a stolen election.
When asked if he should have said something publicly before Jan. 6 about Trump’s pressure on him to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and his lies about Pence’s willingness to go along with subverting the electoral vote certification, Pence suggested that private conversations with Trump had always worked in the past when they disagreed.
“First, let me go back to the nature of our relationship,” Pence said. “For 4 1/2 years, I’d always been loyal to President Donald Trump. He was my president, he was my friend. Whenever we had differences of opinion, I always shared them in private.”
But, he said, “in the weeks before Jan. 6, I repeatedly told the president that I did not have the authority to reject or return electoral votes. It was clear he was getting different legal advice from an outside group of lawyers that, frankly, should have never been let in the building.”
Pence was pressed on whether that particular period of time seemed different with Trump, as it did to many outsiders.
