Lately, former President Donald Trump has seemingly made it his life’s mission to distract from the January 6th Capitol insurrection, perpetrated by his own band of rapid supporters, by any means possible — as we get through the first anniversary of the fateful siege and the House Select Committee that’s currently investigating the attack cranks it up to 11.
But it seems Trump may inadvertently be doing more harm than good to his own cause, according to one Washington Post columnist who feels that Donald, during his recent OAN interview on the topic of January 6th, unwittingly highlighted his own culpability in the matter.
In an analysis for the Washington Post, Philip Bump writes, “In an interview with the far-right cable channel One America News that was released on the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, former president Donald Trump spent four minutes complaining about the media’s failure to cover the size of the crowd at his speech shortly before the riot began.”
Bump goes on to remind his readers that Donald Trump’s presidency was essentially kickstarted on a lie about crowd sizes from his former Press Secretary Sean Spicer, when Spicer falsely claimed, “I am saying it is the total largest audience witnessed in person and around the globe.”
.@PressSec Sean Spicer on inauguration numbers: “I am saying it is the total largest audience witnessed in person and around the globe.” pic.twitter.com/iVLaCdOfpk
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 23, 2017
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Kellyanne Conway would then go on to make a bad situation that much worse when she publicly claimed that Spicer didn’t lie, but rather stated “alternative facts” regarding the crowd size Donald Trump drew in. Bump goes on to more deeply analyze the blatant discrepancies in Trump’s crowd size brags.
“So, in short order: the Ellipse speech crowd was a million people, the biggest crowd ever by some multiple of times, but the media is downplaying it as they did with his inaugural crowd — which, at the time, he said was probably 1.5 million people,” Bump writes.
The WaPo reporter goes on to explain how the ex-President is “trying to reframe the day’s events from the riot to the frustration over the election. But, of course, those things are inseparable. The point is entirely that Trump brought thousands of people to Washington and convinced them that the election was stolen. Then some of those people broke into the Capitol to keep him in power while Trump watched on television from the White House. That Trump made everyone so furious and then encouraged them to show up is exactly the issue.”
You can read Bump’s full analysis on Trump’s recent OAN interview here, and watch Trump’s OAN interview below:
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
