Former president Donald Trump has shared that he regrets not marching with rioters as part of the January 6, 2021 attackon the Capitol that left multiple people dead and police officers wounded. Last week, Trump spoke with The Washington Post in an interview and indicated that he regretted not taking part in the insurrection that appalled and horrified viewers worldwide. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Trump said. “I would have gone there in a minute.”
As analyzed by Chris Cillizza, Editor-at-large at CNN, two takeaways from Trump’s interview with the publication were that, when looking back on the attack, he seemed to only recall two things: that he “didn’t get to march to the Capitol with the rioters” and that “the media didn’t accurately reflect the size of the crowd.”
“In short: He just doesn’t get it. Or he doesn’t care to get it,” Cillizza wrote of the impact and infamy of the insurrection and Trump’s lethargic reaction to it. “Consider, for a minute, what the former president is saying there. When he thinks back on a day that left several people dead and more than a hundred police officers wounded, his big regret is that he didn’t march with the mob to the Capitol building. Not that people lost their lives. Not that lawmakers feared for their well-being. Not that it took him several hours of watching the riot unfold on TV before issuing a lukewarm call for the rioters to go home.”
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In the interview, Trump also touched upon the crowd size at the “Stop the Steal” rally. “The crowd was far bigger than I even thought,” he said. “I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures.”
Cillizza helped point out that when there are much more crucial and vital takeaways from the terrifying historical moment (i.e. deaths, injuries, violent break-in of the Capitol), Trump is still fixated on wanting “credit for drawing a big crowd for a rally expressly aimed at protesting the 2020 election,” and how this is the “same crowd that subsequently stormed the Capitol and left chaos and destruction in its wake.” (But Trump can’t seem to acknowledge that part, the most critical part.)
“Number one, it’s a lie.”
CNN’s @JohnKingCNN reacts to former President Donald Trump’s interview with The Washington Post, in which he claimed the Secret Service would not let him join the march to the Capitol on January 6. Hear more: https://t.co/qYNKOwfA00 pic.twitter.com/4QkXWiiJN4
— CNN (@CNN) April 7, 2022
For Trump, January 6th of last year was just “another day where he drew a big crowd and the media didn’t give him credit,” Cillizza continued. “That’s the lesson he “learned” from that day.” The writer emphasized that this “matters,” not just because Trump seems blissfully unaware of what happened— and what he sanctioned that day—but because Trump could possibly run again in 2024. “Trump appears to not have reflected, for even a minute, about the role he played on January 6th— and what an insurrection at the Capitol means for the present and future of democracy.”
In the Post interview, Trump also maintained (without any evidence whatsoever) that the 2020 election was stolen from him rather than admitting he lost. “I believe when you see massive election fraud, I can’t imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn’t happen,” he asked. “How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back.”
As Cillizza concluded, and perhaps the most pertinent takeaway from the former president’s recent interview, is that we should all “remember that those who don’t—or choose not to—learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” which makes what Trump said all the more scarier.
