Former President Donald Trump on Thursday falsely claimed a mob of his supporters had posed “zero threat” when they attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that some had engaged in simply “hugging and kissing the police.”
“Some of them went in and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out,” Trump said during a Fox News interview on Thursday night.
Here's what Trump had to say on Fox tonight about the Capitol riots:
"It was zero threat, right from the start… Some of them went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards… a lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out" pic.twitter.com/tPCwuzrlOd
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 26, 2021
The assessment by the former president who told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that his supporters posed “zero threat” comes as the nation reels from the death of five people including a Capitol police officer in the aftermath of the attack.
“They went in, they shouldn’t have done it,” Trump said, before claiming that the rioters were being treated unfairly.
“They’re persecuting a lot of those people,” Trump said, before invoking antifa and Black Lives Matter, alleging that antifa had killed and beat up people without consequence.
“Nothing happened to them whatsoever,” Trump claimed.
According to CNN, DC police arrested more than five times as many people at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer than they did on the day of the Capitol insurrection.
At the mention of antifa, the network displayed clips of unrest in Minneapolis in the wake of the death of the police killing of George Floyd in May. Footage from the violence at the Capitol was not provided as a backdrop when Trump insisted his supporters had been “hugging and kissing the police.”
Trump’s depiction of an alternate reality, comes as GOP lawmakers try to rewrite the history of the violent riot.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been a ringleader in the effort to downplay the life-threatening events of the Capitol attack, while desperately trying to paint the Black Lives Matter movement as violent.
Black Lives Matter has repeatedly used as a punching bag by Republicans to deflect attention from the violence that unfolded at the Capitol.
In a radio interview that aired earlier this month, he said that he “wasn’t concerned” when the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol.
“I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said, before demonizing protests that took place last summer under a banner of racial justice.
“Had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,” he said at the time.
