Less than three weeks before the election that could return him to the White House, Donald Trump again expressed solidarity with the violent domestic terrorists who assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021, leaving 140 police officers injured and five dead.
“That was a day of love,” Trump said Wednesday evening as he repeated a number of lies about the day that saw the bloody culmination of his failed coup attempt. “Nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong.”
Trump used the pronoun “we” as he described his mob. He called police officers and National Guard troops “the others.”
“He knew what he was doing on January 6,” said Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who was attacked while defending the building. “He lit the fuse that caused that day.”
Trump’s rambling and in places contradictory answer at a Miami town hall hosted by Univision came in response to a question from a former supporter who asked if he would explain his actions and inactions on January 6.
Trump started by saying he continues to disagree with then-Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to follow the law and the Constitution to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory ― rather than falsely declare Trump the winner, as Trump had demanded Pence do.
Trump then said:
Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me. They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down. This was a tiny percentage of the overall which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows. But that was a day of love. From the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands. It could have been the largest group I’ve ever spoken before. They asked me to speak. I went and I spoke, and I used the term peacefully and patriotically.
In those 164 words are five separate lies that, amid the exaggerated boasts about the size of his crowd, together create a fantastically false portrait of that day.
First, Trump’s followers did not organically show up in Washington, D.C., from around the country on the day of Congress’ ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote. They came because, starting on December 19, 2020, with a tweet asking them to come — “Be there, will be wild!” — Trump repeatedly encouraged attendance at his planned “big protest.”
And while Trump and his apologists and enablers have repeatedly said his supporters were not armed, that has been proven false. Militia groups that supported Trump’s coup attempt brought caches of guns for use that day if Trump had called for them to do so. The Secret Service on that morning learned that a number of his followers gathered in the area around the speech location had guns, including assault rifles.
According to testimony for the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, when Trump was advised of this, he demanded that the Secret Service take down the magnetometers at the entrances to his rally because his supporters did not intend to harm him.
Trump’s claim that “nobody” died is also false. Babbitt was shot as she tried to climb through a broken-out window into a room through which members of Congress were being evacuated. His mob also injured more than 140 police officers — some gravely. One officer died within hours of the assault and four others died by suicide in the weeks and months to come.
Fourth, although Trump has frequently claimed that he had merely been “asked” to speak at the event, he was the one that made it happen in the first place.
“Trump knows what he did and who his confederates are,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican consultant in Florida who on Wednesday publicly endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “Maintaining the fiction that he was an innocent bystander is becoming increasingly difficult as the strain of the campaign increases and his cognitive ability declines.”
Finally, while Trump may claim “nothing done wrong,” the Department of Justice has, to date, charged 1,532 of those involved in the attack on the Capitol with crimes. While domestic terrorism is defined in the United States Code as the use of violence or intimidation to affect government policy, there is no specific federal domestic terrorism charge. Hence, members of Trump’s mob were charged with offenses ranging from seditious conspiracy to trespassing, with 571 charged with assaulting or impeding a law enforcement officer. So far, 1,208 have been convicted at trial or pleaded guilty.
Trump himself has been indicted by federal prosecutors on charges based on the coup attempt. A Georgia grand jury also charged him for his attempt to overturn his election loss in that state.
Trump campaign officials did not respond to HuffPost queries about his new comments and whether he still plans to pardon his followers who have been convicted of assaulting police officers, as he has repeatedly promised.
Trump rarely gets asked about his coup attempt anymore because he has largely stopped doing interviews with anyone other than supporters who want to see him elected.
In recent days, for example, Trump has backed out of interviews with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” CNBC and NBC.