Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Jan. 6, 2021— the day his supporters occupied Congress in a failed insurrection to try to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory—was a “day of love.”
Trump made the baffling claim during a televised election town hall hosted by Univision.
Ramiro González, a construction worker from Tampa, told the meeting he deregistered as a Republican because he found Trump’s “inaction” during both Jan. 6 and the COVID-19 pandemic “disturbing.” He asked Trump to square his controversial behavior during the attack on the U.S. Capitol—and the fact that many of his own former administration officials don’t support him any longer—with why he should be re-elected.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump began by claiming “97 percent” of the people from his previous administration still support him, while acknowledging top officials like his own former vice president, Mike Pence, have said they won’t vote for him again.
Then he started a typically rambling answer to address Jan. 6, when he infamously told a rally of his followers in Washington, D.C., that “if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore” before urging them to march on the Capitol as Congress was certifying the 2020 presidential vote.
“Very importantly you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington,” Trump said, of the rally that an estimated 53,000 people attended. “They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election and that’s why they came.”
Trump went on suggest that his supporters, who caused millions of dollars worth of damage, had been peaceful: “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns, the others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”
He then declared the day a lovefest—even though one protester was fatally shot by Capitol Police, a police officer was fatally assaulted, and a number of other deaths followed.
“When I say ‘we,’ these are people that walked down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows, but that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions—it’s like hundreds of thousands, it could have been the largest group I’ve ever spoken to before,” he added, again exaggerating the size of the crowd.
Trump then boasted that Democrats “couldn’t get me because of the fact that I said ‘Everything’s gotta be peaceful and patriotic.’”
Trump was referring to the moment, at 12:16 p.m., when he told the Jan. 6 rally: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Evidence presented at a House panel in 2022 showed that after he left the event Trump went back to the White House and watched the violent riots unfold at the Capitol on television, doing nothing to stop them for hours.
