Just the evidence presented so far by the J6 committee shows that Trump aimed the mob specifically at his vice president. There’s been a lot of discussion here about his reasoning:
- He wanted to frighten Pence into carrying out Eastman’s coup.
- He wanted to get Pence away from the Capitol so that Grassley would preside and (presumably) carry out Eastman’s coup.
Now Trump’s niece suggests a third possible reason:
- He wanted Pence killed so he would have an excuse to declare martial law.
Trump 'Handed Down Death Sentence To Mike Pence' To Stay In Power: Mary Trump
“We need to be very blunt about what happened,” [Mary Trump] told Katie Phang on MSNBC Friday. Trump “wasn’t just stirring up his insurrectionists to create chaos,” she said. “He handed down a death sentence to Mike Pence.”
Trump said that once Pence defied the former president and refused to overturn the election, her uncle had few options left to stay in power, and may have considered something as “absolutely radical” as “declaring martial law,” which witnesses have indicated. The “death of his vice president” could have paved the way for that, she noted.
And Rep. Zoe Lofgren said this morning that Trump “intended to- to accelerate that violence against the former vice president.”
Seen in this light, Trump’s incendiary tweet to the rioters in the middle of the riot, before Pence had been moved to his secure location, takes on a much more sinister tone. He was telling his followers to kill his vice president so he could then declare martial law and shut Congress down, leaving the election uncertified.
Given Trump’s transactional attitude, it’s doubtful he’d worked out what to do with the country under martial law, whether the military would go along with it, how he could stay in power past the end of his term anyway, and so on. Trump was never much for the hard work of details (except, oddly enough, in his coup plot, and even there he screwed up). But that’s not the point, really.
The point is what Mary Trump had to say about her uncle:
“What people need to understand is that Donald doesn’t believe he should be denied anything he wants.” [italics in original]
The demented orange shitgrubber is going to run again. And this time, he won’t care who he kills to win. He might even try to shoot President Biden on 5th Ave — and lest you think that’s a joke, remember that he showed up for one debate already sick with Covid, and knew he was sick with Covid, to debate a man he knew was vulnerable.