The Office of the Former President Donald Trump seems to have a new item on its agenda: rewriting history. On a call in to Fox News, Trump was asked to weigh in on increased security measures surrounding the Capitol building, instituted after the Jan. 6 riots that claimed five lives and injured many more as crowds of angry Trump supporters surged through the building. Trump, who was banned from Twitter right around this time for having helped incite this violence with baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him, unsurprisingly continues to be sympathetic to the rioters, whom he once called “patriots” and “very special.” What is surprising, however, is just how much Trump’s willing to fly in the face of the truth when describing this event.
Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump called increased security on the Capitol building “disgraceful” before offering his new version of what happened that day.
“It was zero threat, right from the start,” he said, per CNN. “Some of them went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards…a lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out.”
Donald Trump can use these donations to pay off personal debt. 🤔https://t.co/8NKJgOi5Y3
— SheKnows (@SheKnows) March 10, 2021
If one were to look for a kernel of truth in what Trump is saying: Select police officers were seen engaging in a friendly way with the rioters, like the officer spotted taking a selfie with one of the Trump supporters storming the building. The police were also notably less eager to use violence to control the crowd than they had been in the summer of 2020 towards Black Lives Matter riots, which many noted as another confirmation of police forces’ increased brutality toward people of color (the Capitol rioters were, notably, primarily white). But that likely wasn’t the point Trump was hoping to draw out.
For whatever friendly exchanges may have legitimately occurred, over 100 police officers were injured in the Jan. 6 riots, and five people died. We have seen video evidence of the violence that took place, and of the death threats against members of our government that were chanted throughout the halls of the Capitol.
Trump has never appropriately condemned what happened that day. But his latest retelling of the Capitol riots adds insult to injury for all those affected.
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