Donald Trump has spent recent months focusing on Jan. 6 rioters to an unsettling degree, offering them praise, support and vows of future pardons. A recent Associated Press report noted that the former president has positioned “the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.” This coincided with a related Semafor report on the degree to which the Republican has put Jan. 6 rioters “at the heart of his campaign.”
But the presumptive GOP nominee hasn’t just focused on his bond with suspected and convicted insurrectionists; Trump has also shed fresh light on his own actions and intentions related to the assault on the Capitol. NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump acknowledged Wednesday that he told the Secret Service he wanted to go to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, depicting a different tone of an event that became a contentious detail of a former White House aide’s testimony before the House committee that investigated the attack.
The former president’s point was to push back against Cassidy Hutchinson’s 2022 testimony, when the former aide described a scene, which had been described to her by Tony Ornato, in which Trump went a little berserk after his Secret Service detail told him he was being taken back to the White House after his speech at the Ellipse, not to the Capitol.
At his rally in Wisconsin, Trump described different details, but effectively confirmed the underlying claim.
“I sat in the back,” Trump told his supporters, describing his version of events. “And you know what I did say? I said, ‘I’d like to go down there because I see a lot of people walking down.’ They said, ‘Sir, it’s better if you don’t.’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like to.’”
He added that an agent told him, “It’s better if you don’t,” at which point, in Trump’s story, he told the Secret Service, “All right, whatever you guys think is fine.”
“That,” the former president concluded, “was the whole tone of the conversation.”
In other words, what Trump sees as important was his demeanor at the time. A great many sources have given sworn testimony that he was irate on Jan. 6 and fought desperately to join the rioters he’d deployed to Capitol Hill, but the Republican would now have the public believe that he made a request, was given sound advice and he casually accepted the Secret Service’s recommendations.
Or put another way, Trump is missing the point.
Sure, it’s of interest whether the then-president lunged for a steering wheel and/or grabbed an agent around the neck, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Trump fueled a mob with anti-election lies and deployed them to attack his own country’s Capitol.
And, by his own admission, he wanted to join them.
As for what Trump intended to do if he got his way — which is to say, if the Secret Service followed his directive and brought him to Capitol Hill — as we’ve discussed, it’s probably safe to say that once he was inside the halls, presidential oratory wasn’t the plan. It’s not like Trump intended to use his powers of persuasion to convince members of Congress to ignore the election results and give him illegitimate power he hadn’t earned.
It’s more likely he had a different kind of confrontation in mind, which is precisely what makes the acknowledgements such as the one he made yesterday important.