Lo, more tapes of Trump toadies acknowledging for two seconds in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that the attack was then-President Donald Trump’s fault.
During a CNN appearance on Tuesday, New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin unveiled clips of their interviews with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Jan. 6 in which the GOP senator firmly criticized Trump for fueling the rage that led to the insurrection by his supporters.
“He plays the TV game, and he went too far here,” Graham said, adding that Trump’s pre-insurrection rally at the Ellipse — during which the then-president railed against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and other Republicans who didn’t help him try to steal the 2020 election — “didn’t help.”
“He created a sense of revenge,” Graham said.
In another clip, the Republican lawmaker praised President-elect Joe Biden as “the best person” to unify the country in wake of the attack.
“I mean, how mad can you get at Joe Biden?” he asked.
Graham predicted that, “We’ll actually come out of this thing stronger.”
“Moments like this reset. People will calm down,” the Republican senator told Martin. “People will say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that.'”
Several weeks later, Graham, as we know, went out of his way to help Trump during the Senate impeachment trial before crawling to Mar-A-Lago to cement his loyalty to the ex-president once more. He also made a big show of gushing over Trump’s “magic” with the GOP.
Revelations of Graham’s taped remarks come several weeks after Burns and Martin released similar audio of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) privately blasting Trump in a call with fellow House GOP leaders several days after Jan. 6.
But like Graham, McCarthy’s break from Trump was comically short-lived.
Listen to the audio below:
