In a chummy Thursday night interview with Fox News host and one-time informal presidential adviser Sean Hannity, Trump was asked pointedly whether he called up the National Guard on Jan. 6, 2021, to help quell the violence in Washington, D.C.
“One hundred percent, and attested to by many people,” Trump replied. “And they turned it down… Nancy Pelosi turned it down, and she is in charge of the Capitol.”
Trump first made this baseless claim, which was promptly debunked, in February 2021. Nearly a year later, he’s still claiming that “we would have had no Jan. 6 as we know it” if not for his political foes.
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“There would have been no problem whatsoever, but they turned it down, which tells you everything,” Trump claimed, referring to both Pelosi and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser. If not for those Democrats, he went on, “You would not have had any problem. It would have just been absolutely a lovely day.”
As for the crowd he addressed that day, Trump made it sound like a summer of love in January:
“It was a lot of love there. Believe me, there was a lot of love and a lot of friendship, and people that love our country. These are great people,” he said, echoing Hannity’s colleague Tucker Carlson, who declared last week that one of the alleged Oath Keepers hit with seditious conspiracy charges was a “thoroughly patriotic American.”
Trump did not bother to mention the hundreds of felony charges handed down, and neither did Hannity.
Hannity also didn’t ask Trump a bread-and-butter question about the 2020 election, perhaps influenced by the Jan. 6 committee releasing texts on Thursday that show him urging then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEneny to get the then-president to lay off the “stolen election talk.”
For his part, Trump did seem to put a sliver of distance between himself and his more violent supporters who came out on Jan. 6, saying “This was a protest against the election which they considered to be totally rigged.”
