Former Republican National Committee spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington not only doesn’t believe that President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection last week, but on Tuesday she claimed that, actually, the “real insurrection” was President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
During a Tuesday morning appearance on the stridently pro-Trump cable news channel Newsmax, first spotted by Media Matters, Harrington parroted the emerging conservative talking point that impeaching Trump for inciting a seditious mob would further inflame Trump supporters and potentially plummet the country into violence.
“They don’t want unity. They want uniformity,” she fumed. “That’s been the goal. They want one-party rule. That’s what they’re trying to do.”
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After grumbling about corporations distancing themselves from Trump and other Republicans that relentlessly pushed false claims about the election, complaining that “this is not American” before seemingly urging MAGA insurgents to continue to fight for Trump’s presidency.
“And if I could just say one more final point. The real insurrection, if you wanna go down that path, happened on November 4 at about 3:30 in the morning when all those vote dumps were dropped,” she exclaimed, peddling unfounded election denialism.
“That’s when it happened,” continued Harrington, seated in front of a MAGA flag with the creases still visible. “That was the overthrow. That was taking away the agency and the self-government of the American people. And if we allow it to stand, that's the real crisis here, and that's who should be disqualified from being the president.”
“It’s Joe Biden, he’s not a duly elected president,” she concluded, engaging in the same rhetoric that resulted in a mob incitement to begin with.
Following the deadly riots that featured throngs of thousands of Trump supporters storming the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election, the FBI has warned about “armed protests” that are scheduled at all 50 state capitols and Washington, D.C. ahead of Biden’s inauguration next week.
The president, meanwhile, continues to not take responsibility for his actions that egged on the riotous mob, saying Tuesday morning that his “Stop the Steal” rally speech in which he urged his supporters to walk to the Capitol and “fight” was “totally appropriate.”
Harrington, who served as the RNC’s national spokesperson during the last election cycle, has been a loud booster of the president’s baseless conspiracy theories that the election was “stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud. In the immediate days after the election, she made numerous and repeated false claims about Biden’s votes that were easily and quickly debunked.
