We know that happened on January 6th. We saw it with our own eyes, heard the testimony of his own staff and read the reports. The facts cannot be disputed. Trump lied about the election of 2020, called people to Washington, incited an insurrection in which they stormed the Capitol and hunted for the Vice President chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” And we know that Trump took no action and let it unfold until late in the day he finally told the rioters that he loved them and asked them to go home.
According to the once and future president, Donald Trump, none of that is what happened:
None of this is the story Trump tells. Instead, he inverts both the culpability and the morality: The rioters are victims, and those seeking justice are guilty of injustices. It’s deeply and transparently self-serving. It’s also the position of the incoming president of the United States, someone empowered to enforce his vision of justice on the rest of the country.
Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker last week during which he outlined his upside-down view of the events of Jan. 6.
Welker asked Trump about his repeated pledges during the campaign to pardon those imprisoned for their actions during the riot. He reiterated that sweeping pardons would be one of his first acts as president.
“Those people have suffered long and hard,” he said of those who were sentenced to prison. He noted that there might be some exceptions — but not those accused of being members of extremist organizations or who engaged in the most violent actions. Instead, he mused that there might have been some “antifa” swept up in the prosecutions, resuscitating a long-debunked idea that left-wing actors were involved in the violence that day. In case there was uncertainty about the extent to which he was suggesting that the riots weren’t the fault of his supporters, he brought up Ray Epps, a man whose alleged role in fomenting the riot has been debunked repeatedly and exhaustively.
“But some of them, 169 of them, have pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers,” Welker reminded Trump.
“Because they had no choice,” he responded.
There were some people who deserved to be investigated or thrown in jail, Trump said: the members of the congressional committee that investigated the riot and the special counsel who brought charges against him.
The committee members did something “inexcusable,” Trump said, when they “went through a year and a half of testimony [and] deleted and destroyed all evidence — that they found.” The Democratic-led committee did this, he said, to protect former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who he has suggested was responsible for the police being overrun. But that never happened. Welker offered a wan “they deny doing that” in response to Trump’s claim; the reality is that the committee’s work and evidence are publicly available and Trump’s hoary claim has been debunked.
They did not do it and Welker failed at her job by not saying that clearly. He’s fucking nuts.
I remain hopeful that Jack Smith will issue a full report on this (and Garland will release it) and preserves as much of the evidence as possible. (Making most of it public would go a long way.) It’s not much. But all we have at this point is history. And Trump’s version of events is 100% delusional.
By the way:
I wish I thought that would make a difference …