President Donald Trump has banned Vice President, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short from the White House.
In recent weeks, Trump had pushed Pence to overturn the results of the November election in his favor.
In a rally held Wednesday, Jan 6, near the White House, Trump grew increasingly vocal in his demands while speaking to a group of supporters who later stormed the Capitol building in an attempted insurrection.
“Mike Pence, I hope you get to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country, and if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you,” Trump said.
Instead, Pence released a lengthy statement rejecting the president’s demands.
Pence said in his statement: “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.
Mike Pence also changed his Twitter bio to a photo of President-elect Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent.
This didn’t sit well with Trump and he took to Twitter to call Mike Pence out.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump wrote. “USA demands the truth!”
Trump’s tweet was later deleted by Twitter.
The US President remained “vindictive,” according to Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, who told RealClearPolitics reporter Phillip Wegmann he had been barred from the White House grounds because of Pence’s decision not to follow the president’s orders.
“[Trump’s] blaming me for advice to VP,” Short told Wegmann, according to the reporter’s tweet.
