President Trump has said that the events on January 6 at Capitol Hill was just a protest, and that the real insurrection took place against him on Election Day 2020 and the following weeks.
In an exclusive interview with esteemed British politician-turned-commentator Nigel Farage on GB News, President Trump was asked by Farage if it was a “mistake” to have a rally in Washington D.C. at the same time that the electoral college votes were being counted in Congress, given that it had been used by the media to smear the then-sitting President as having incited an “insurrection.”
“The real insurrection took place on November 3, that was Election Day, and before and after,” President Trump replied. “That was to me the insurrection and the January 6 was a protest.”
Trump added that the crowd size at the official rally that took place some distance from the protests was the “biggest” he’d ever spoken in front of. “I’ve spoken to very big crowds. I have never spoken in front of a crowd that size. Nobody every talks about that,” he added.
‘Election Day, to me, was the insurrection, the events on January 6th were a protest’
Donald Trump responds to claims that he was to blame for the events at Capitol Hill on 6th January. pic.twitter.com/9k18XMlHwy
— GB News (@GBNEWS) December 1, 2021
Trump instead put the blame sorely for the “bad things” that happened on January 6 at the foot of Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats, and others. “I offered 10,000 and suggested 10,000 national guardsmen… or even the military [be stationed near the Capitol] because I knew the crowd was going to be massive, because I knew the anger that took place over the election being rigged and I understood that, I understood it better than anybody. And Pelosi and these people turned it down. We would have had tremendous security but they turned it down.”
He added that doing so would have “stopped any problem” from occuring. “The police were not given proper instructions by Capitol Hill, which is Pelosi. They were given some very bad instructions,” Trump continued.
In July, a spokesman for Pelosi argued that Trump’s claims were simply “a clear attempt to whitewash what happened… and divert blame,” adding that Pelosi was “a target of an assassination attempt that day,” despite no evidence to support such a claim.
Earlier on in the interview with Farage, the GB News pointed out that the real effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was that “for the first time ever in America, tens of millions of ballots [were] being sent out through the mail system.”
In response, Trump railed against the Democrat efforts to push mail-in ballots in 2020, arguing that his opponents “used Covid, or the China Virus as I call it, to rob and rig and steal an election.”
'They used Covid to rob and rig and steal the election.'
Donald Trump responds to criticism he received from Joe Biden for closing the borders due to the pandemic, and from others who say he didn't lockdown quickly enough. pic.twitter.com/HWEgOXhaxE
— GB News (@GBNEWS) December 1, 2021
“They sent out millions and millions of ballots. Nobody knows where they went in so many cases, and it was a disgrace. Everybody knows it, you look at even polls now, a big percentage of our country knows it, and it’s very bad for democracy.”