Before heading to the U.S. Capitol to preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence undertook one last unpleasant task from his Naval Observatory home: a phone call with Donald Trump, the president to whom he had always been loyal.

Pence had told Trump repeatedly he would not use his ceremonial role overseeing the counting of electoral college votes that day to overturn Joe Biden’s election, but Trump had not listened. The call was “heated,” in the words of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, in new testimony revealed Thursday by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump called Pence a “wimp,” Trump aide Nicholas Luna testified. Trump’s badgering of his own vice president so distressed his daughter that she walked the halls of the White House, expressing her displeasure to multiple aides, several testified. She told her chief of staff that “her dad had just had an upsetting call with the vice president,” the aide testified, noting that Trump had called Pence the “p-word.”

The day that began with the vice president being called a “p----” by his boss ended with him huddled in a parking garage with his family, as a violent mob intent on doing him physical harm rampaged through the seat of American democracy and a top aide read from a Bible nearby.

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