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n ex-top aide to former Vice President Mike Pence said that Donald Trump’s dismissal of the Constitution has been a “consistent trend” since the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday where he discussed Trump’s recent call for the “termination” of the Constitution so that he can retake the White House. Short said that such calls were not fitting for a presidential campaign platform and also asserted that it fits a trend in Trump’s outlook since the insurrection.
“I feel like we’ve seen this…digression continue ever since January 6,” Short told host Chuck Todd. “As far as putting the Constitution aside, I cannily think that’s what he asked the Vice President [Pence] to do two years ago, when rioters were attacking the Capitol and he asked the Vice President to overturn the election results. So I think, unfortunately, this has been a consistent trend.”
Trump on Friday night took to his alternative social network, Truth Social, with a reaction to supposed revelations found in Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s and journalist Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter Files,” which concerned the company’s botched decision to suppress a story relating to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The former president said that the “Massive Fraud” that the files supposedly revealed should be enough to suspend the rules of the Constitution, and either lead to his reinstatement as president or to a new do-over election.
The post created a new wave of backlash against Trump, with pundits, reporters, and other general commentators accusing him of increasingly open attacks on democracy. Among those reacting to the post was Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who said that Trump’s call to suspend the Constitution in the name of securing power for himself should be disqualifying.
“Constitution-trashing in itself isn’t disqualifying: some leading legal scholars have written academic articles urging the Constitution’s abandonment,” Tribe wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “What’s disqualifying is trying to do it to seize power for oneself and one’s faction as Trump is doing.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s representatives for comment.
Short has been among the former Trump White House staff members that have spoken out against his actions following the end of his presidency. During a September interview with Fox News, Short criticized Trump’s lawyers for allegedly misleading Justice Department investigators over his possession of sensitive documents, claiming that he had returned all the requested items when he had not.
“And I think there’s also a question about why Trump’s lawyers apparently were so misleading, potentially lying in the affidavit saying they returned all the information,” Short said. “There’s a difference between playing a lawyer on TV and actually having good legal counsel.”
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