7.8 “STAY PEACEFUL!”
No one was getting through to the President.
So Herschmann went to Ivanka Trump's office, hoping she would come to the dining room and be "a calming influence" on her father.[199] Herschmann "just sort of barged in" and told her to turn on the television.[200] After taking in a few of the violent scenes together, Herschmann and Ivanka Trump left the room and walked to the dining room, where her father was holed up.[201]
At 2:38 p.m., the President issued a tweet:[202]
Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful![203]
Ivanka Trump told the Select Committee that the President "did not push back on [her] suggestion" to issue the tweet, and that it was either she or President Trump himself who suggested the last line, "Stay peaceful!"[204] She confirmed there may have been some tweaking of the wording.[205] McEnany, who was in the room at the time, wrote in her notes that "I say add 'we support PEACEFUL protest.' Ivanka add stay peaceful! Instead."[206] To the Select Committee, McEnany echoed Ivanka Trump that the President wasn't resistant in any way to putting out the message.[207] But in private, McEnany told a different story to her deputy Sarah Matthews.
Back in the White House press office, Matthews told McEnany that the tweet did not go far enough in condemning the violence.[208] McEnany—noting that other staffers in the room were distracted—said "in a hushed tone . . . that the President did not want to include any sort of mention of peace in that tweet."[209]
That took "some convincing on their part," McEnany said, and "it wasn't until Ivanka Trump suggested the phrase 'Stay peaceful!' that he finally agreed to include it."[210]
Ivanka Trump repeatedly returned to the dining room to counsel her father throughout the day. It has been reported that each time Ivanka Trump "thought she had made headway" with her father, Meadows would call her "to say the [P]resident still needed more persuading"—a cycle that repeated itself over "several hours" that afternoon.[211] After one such trip, Ivanka Trump told the Select Committee she went to her husband's office next door because she needed to "regroup" and collect herself.[212]
Several witnesses corroborated pieces of this account. General Kellogg said he saw Ivanka Trump coming and going from the dining room at least twice that afternoon.[213] Hutchinson said that it was "several times."[214]
Once, Ivanka Trump reportedly left her father with a look on her face as if
