Vanity Fair obtained excerpts from Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker when they sat down for an interview with now-former President Donald Trump for their new book, “I Alone Can Fix It.” And even though over 140 police officers were injured when the U.S. Capitol was attacked by the former guy’s supporters, the twice-impeached one-term president heaped praise on the rioters. Trump, a raging narcissist, touted that he was an even better president than Ronald Reagan because his supporters chanted out, “We love you!” on Jan. 6 just before he incited the mob to try to overturn the election results.
“Trump argued that he stands apart from the presidents before him by the loyalty and intensity of his supporters. “There’s never been a base that screams out, with thirty-five thousand people, ‘We love you! We love you!’” he said. “That never happened to Ronald Reagan. It never happened to anybody. We have a base like no other. They’re very angry. That’s what happened in Washington on the sixth,” the outlet reports. ‘They went down because of the election fraud. The one thing that nobody says is how many people were there, because if you look at that real crowd, the crowd for the speech, I’ll bet you it was over a million people.”’
Trump was asked by the reporters what his goal was on January 6 and what he had hoped his supporters would do after he told them to march on the Capitol.
“He chose to remark again on the size of the crowd. “I would venture to say I think it was the largest crowd I had ever spoken [to] before,” Trump said, according to the excerpt. “It was a loving crowd, too, by the way. There was a lot of love. I’ve heard that from everybody. Many, many people have told me that was a loving crowd. It was too bad, it was too bad that they did that.”
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“Pressed again, Trump said he had hoped his supporters would show up outside the Capitol but not enter the building. “In all fairness, the Capitol Police were ushering people in,” Trump said,” the outlet reports. “The Capitol Police were very friendly. They were hugging and kissing. You don’t see that. There’s plenty of tape on that.”
“Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,” Trump said of the Capitol stormers. “They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before. There’s tremendous proof.”
There is literally no proof that the election was rigged. However, there is video evidence of Trump inciting his mob to supporters to try to stop a peaceful transition of power.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Michael Vadon/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
