ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump now claims that the home terrorists he pardoned who violently attacked law enforcement officials throughout his Jan. 6, 2021, coup try have been truly the victims of that day.
“I pardoned individuals who have been assaulted themselves. They have been assaulted by our authorities,” he stated in a half-hour information convention with the reporters touring with him on his flight to the Tremendous Bowl on Sunday.
“That’s who have been assaulted they usually have been handled unfairly. There’s by no means been a gaggle of individuals on this nation exterior of possibly one occasion I can consider, however I received’t get into it, that have been handled extra horribly than the folks of J6,” he continued. “So no, I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They have been assaulted, and what I did was an excellent factor for humanity.”
Trump let loose a whole lot of his followers who had been convicted of assaulting police on Jan. 6 as a part of his try to overturn the election he had misplaced and stay in workplace. That group was among the many nearly 1,600 total pardons for Jan. 6 instances Trump issued on his first day in workplace, which included about 1,000 nonviolent offenders and about 200 accused police assaulters whose instances have been nonetheless pending.
Greater than 140 law enforcement officials defending the Capitol from Trump’s mob have been injured that day, some gravely. One died hours later, and 4 extra died by suicide within the coming months. The mob’s conduct, utilizing violence or the specter of violence to impact political change, is the definition of terrorism. And utilizing violence or the specter of violence to stay in energy, authoritarian consultants say, meets the definition of a self-coup.
Trump, however, continues to assert he is a good supporter of regulation enforcement. His White Home employees organized for him to satisfy with law enforcement officials who responded to the New 12 months’s Day terror assault in New Orleans an hour earlier than the beginning of Sunday’s sport.
However the president had performed golf with Tiger Woods at Trump’s West Palm Seaside course Sunday morning and arrived in New Orleans a couple of half hour delayed. It’s unclear precisely how this affected the tightly orchestrated Tremendous Bowl pregame program, however Trump wound up spending lower than two minutes on the sphere with the law enforcement officials and victims of the assault.
Within the information convention ― which Trump aides introduced with simply 10 minutes discover so he might boast about his renaming the Gulf of Mexico because the “Gulf of America” as Air Power 1 flew over it — Trump additionally repeated his earlier claims that Canada was “not a viable nation” and ought to be taken over by the USA; that Greenland must also be taken over by the USA; and that the Gaza Strip can be “owned” by the USA and its two million residents moved elsewhere.
ROBERTO SCHMIDT through Getty Pictures
He once more expressed assist for Elon Musk’s rampage in opposition to federal businesses on his behalf, repeating, with out proof, that the multibillionaire had discovered rampant fraud. “We now have great fraud, great waste and great abuse, and theft, by the way in which,” he stated.
Trump additionally repeated assaults on federal judges who’ve put a pause on Musk’s makes an attempt to unilaterally cancel congressionally mandated spending and even shut down complete businesses. “No decide, frankly, ought to be allowed to make that form of a choice. It’s a shame,” he stated.
His personal vice chairman, J.D. Vance, has additionally said that judges shouldn’t be in a position to override the manager department — a view that runs counter to greater than 220 years of established constitutional regulation. Three years in the past, Vance said that Trump, have been he to win again the White Home, ought to emulate President Andrew Jackson’s probably apocryphal defiance of the Supreme Courtroom. “When the courts cease you, stand earlier than the nation like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him implement it,’” Vance said in a podcast interview.
When requested Sunday whether or not he agreed together with his vice chairman, Trump claimed to not perceive the query. “I don’t know even what you’re speaking about,” he stated. “Neither do you.”
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Upon studying that the questioner labored for HuffPost, Trump, as he does continuously, went on to insult the publication. “I believed they died,” he stated. “Are they nonetheless round? I haven’t learn them in years. I believed they died.”
Trump equally attacked Time journal final week, asking in the event that they have been “nonetheless in enterprise” in response to a brand new cowl exhibiting Musk sitting at Trump’s desk within the Oval Workplace. Barely a month earlier, he had stated being named Time’s individual of the yr was a “great honor.”
