Former President Donald Trump sought to whitewash the deadly riot he spurred at the U.S. Capitol on the attack’s third anniversary and called for the release of those who committed violent crimes on his behalf.
Speaking at an Iowa rally late Saturday, he vowed to “take over our Capitol” and federalize Washington, D.C. should he retake office in order to combat violent crime—and said he would do the same to all major cities run by Democrats.
Convicted criminals who participated in violence on his behalf during the Capitol riot in D.C., however, ought to be freed, he said.
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“They ought to release the J6 hostages, they’ve suffered enough. They oughta release them. I call them hostages. Release the J6 hostages, Joe, release em Joe, you can do it real easy, Joe,” he said, addressing President Joe Biden.
Over 1,200 people who took part in the Capitol riot have been arrested; of that number nearly 900 pled guilty or were found guilty at trial.
Trump, taking aim at Biden, suggested the president both masterminded the FBI and DOJ plot against his presidential run and is incompetent to the degree that his mental fortitude constitutes a “threat to democracy.”
The day prior, Biden recounted the many avenues by which Trump tried and failed to overturn the results of the election in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack during a speech that cast Trump as a fundamental threat to American democracy.
“Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the election,” Biden said. “Every one. But the legal path just took Trump back to the truth: that I had won the election and he was a loser. Well, knowing how his mind works now, he had one act left. One desperate act available to him: the violence of Jan. 6.”
In a bizarre tangent, the former president also criticized President Lincoln’s handling of the Civil War and suggested the dividing issue of slavery could have been negotiated over.
“So many mistakes were made,” Trump said. “See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. … I was reading something and I said, ‘This is something that could have been negotiated … that was a ... that was a tough one for our country… If you negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was … but that would have been OK.”
Trump again doubled down on comments he made during a town hall with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, where he vowed to act as a dictator if re-elected, recounting the conversation to the crowd in Iowa: “[Sean] said ‘You’re not going to be a dictator.’ I said ‘No, no, Sean … I’m going to be a dictator for one day.”
“And then said ‘and then I’m not going to be a dictator any longer,’” he said.
