‘This Has to Stop’: Ivanka Reportedly Spent ‘Several Hours’ Urging Trump to Dissuade Capitol Rioters
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
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Despite widespread coverage of the destruction dealt to the US Capitol in early January, it took former US President Donald Trump over three hours to issue a message calling for rioters to “remain peaceful.” An hour later, he sent out a mixed message that reiterated voter fraud claims and encouraged his supporters to “go home.”
As thousands of Trump supporters broke past security barriers and ransacked the US Capitol, Ivanka Trump repeatedly called on her father, then President Donald Trump, to dissuade rioters, a newly released tell-all book about the Trump White House has revealed.
Titled “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” the book was written by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. It hit bookshelves on Thursday and has since offered new details on, well, the final days of the Trump administration.
One of the new revelations includes exchanges between Trump and his eldest daughter Ivanka as the events of January 6 unfolded right before their very eyes, the first of which began with the president telling his second-in-command that he did not have “courage” to halt the certification of the election results.
“Ivanka Trump, standing next to [former national security adviser Keith] Kellogg near a grandfather clock in the back of the room, had a hard time listening to her father badger the vice president to do something she knew was not possible,” an excerpt released by the Washington Post reads. “‘Mike Pence is a good man,’ she said quietly.”
Screenshot captures an unidentified individual who participated in the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. The individual is wanted by federal authorities fo assaulting law enforcement officials.
© Screenshot/FBI
As the day went on and her father took the stage at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the White House lawn, Ivanka, who at the time served as her father’s senior advisor and confidant, reportedly remained uneasy about the entire situation. By the time rioters broke into the federal building, she kicked it into high gear and began a persuasion campaign urging her father to call off the rioters.
“As soon as she saw on the television in her second-floor office that the rioters were inside the Capitol, Ivanka Trump said to her aides, ‘I’m going down to my dad. This has to stop,’” the book notes. “She spent several hours walking back and forth to the Oval [Office] trying to persuade the president to be stronger in telling his supporters he stood with law enforcement and ordering them to disperse.”
“Just when Ivanka Trump thought she had made headway and returned upstairs, [former White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows would call her to say that the president still needed more persuading,” Rucker and Leonnig detail. This back and forth between the Trumps is said to have “repeated itself several times.”
“As another presidential adviser said, ‘Ivanka was described to me like a stable pony. When the racehorse gets too agitated, you bring the stable pony in to calm him down,’” the excerpt read, also indicating that Meadows at-times ordered the room cleared so that Ivanka could get through her father.
At one point in the day, even US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reportedly called in for Ivanka to step in and convince the president “to tell these people to leave.”
Pro-Trump protesters storm into the U.S. Capitol during clashes with police, during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S, January 6, 2021
© REUTERS / Shannon Stapleton
Trump’s daughter did also attempt to quell the rioters through her own Twitter account, urging the “American Patriots” to pull back and remain “peaceful.” However, that message was deleted not long after it went live.
— David Mack (@davidmackau) January 6, 2021
In the end, the former president did not urge his supporters to cease the violence until after 3 p.m. local time, more than an hour after reports first trickled in that individuals had broken past security barriers at the US Capitol. But as the newly-released book notes, many members of his inner circle were not a fan of the single tweet and wanted more action from the president.
And then came then-President-elect Joe Biden’s address from Delaware. Shortly afterwards, Trump tweeted out a video address that had a reworked mix of voter fraud claims and calls for the “special” supporters to “go home in peace.”
It was not until roughly 8 p.m. local time that authorities were able to have enough control of the situation to have lawmakers resume their election certification procedures. In the weeks that followed, a second impeachment process against Trump was launched on the basis of inciting an insurrection. However, the effort ultimately died in the US Senate.
To date, Trump has continued to voice unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, allegations of which even prompted a recount in Arizona. Talks of similar efforts have also been taken up in other US states, including in Pennsylvania.
