TRUMP DEFENDS REMARKS BEFORE ATTACK
President Donald Trump emerged Tuesday from six days out of public view unapologetic about his incitement of last week’s mob attack on the Capitol and warned that his impeachment could lead to more violence.
The president denied culpability in the riot that killed a police officer and threatened the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. He said his remarks encouraging throngs of supporters last week to march to the Capitol in a show of force to pressure and intimidate lawmakers to overturn the election results were “totally appropriate.”
During a visit to a portion of newly constructed border wall in the Rio Grande Valley, Trump warned against the effort in Congress to hold him accountable.
“The impeachment hoax is a continuation of the greatest and most vicious witch hunt in the his
tory of our country and is causing tremendous anger and division and pain, far greater than most people will ever understand, which is very dangerous for the USA, especially at this very tender time,” Trump said.
Trump for the first time addressed the calls from Democrats and even some Republicans for Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office before his term expires. Pence released a letter later in the day saying he would not take that step.
“The 25th Amendment is of zero risk to me but will come back to haunt Joe Biden and the Biden administration,” Trump said. “As the expression goes, ‘ Be careful what you wish for.’ ”
Washing ton is seeing a heightened police and military presence in and around the city, and law enforcement authorities are bracing for future violence in the run-up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Trump at first hesitated to tell his supporters to stand down when they stormed the Capitol. He was captivated by the spectacle playing out on live television and entranced by the notion that the rioters were fighting for him, people with knowledge of the events said. And when he issued a video last Wednesday afternoon telling the rioters to “go home,” he also declared his support for them by saying, “We love you.”
In his prepared remarks in Texas on Tuesday, the president seemed to instruct his supporters not to rise up in violence. “Now is the time for our nation to heal. And it’s time for peace and for calm. Respect for law enforcement is the foundation of the MAGA agenda,” he said, referring to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump def lected a reporter’s question about his “personal responsibility” in the Capitol attack as he boarded Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews for the f light to Texas.
“People thought what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump said, claiming that he had seen this view ref lected across the media. In fact, he has been widely condemned for his remarks, including by some of his Republican allies.
Trump then drew a comparison to racial justice demonstrations last summer and suggested that other political leaders were more culpable for violence related to those events than he was for what happened at the Capitol last week.
“If you look at what other people have said — politicians at a high level — about the riots during the summer, the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle, in various other places. That was a real problem, what they said,” Trump said. “But they’ve analyzed my speech and words and my final paragraph, my final sentence, and everybody, to the T, thought it was totally appropriate.”
On Capitol Hill, however, some of Trump’s allies differed with that assessment as the drumbeat for impeachment grew.
A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, said he disagreed with Trump that his comments were “totally appropriate.” The spokesman added that McCarthy told House members on Monday that the president bore blame.
And while a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment, a person who has spoken to him says he is open to convicting Trump in an impeachment trial and thinks the president is likely to have committed impeachable offenses but wants to hear evidence.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement, “We all bear responsibility to ref lect on the rhetoric leading up to the abhorrent violence of last week, including the president.”
Trump has resisted some entreaties to take responsibility for the mob, claiming that he did not know his supporters would literally storm the Capitol and that he did not want them to do so. He has dismissed concerns from his lawyers and other aides that he might have legal liability for his instigation, according to a senior administration official, who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal details.
Trump continues to say privately that he won the election, another senior administration official said, but is no longer talking about trying to stay in office after his term has ended.
A poll released Monday by Quinnipiac University found that Trump’s overall approval dipped to 33 percent, tied for the lowest the pollster has recorded, with majorities holding him responsible for the Capitol attack and favoring his removal from office or his resignation.
Trump sought to escape this dark reality Tuesday by flying to the U.S.-Mexico border in a bid to burnish his presidential legacy as a crusader against illegal immigration. He toured a portion of the wall on the dusty banks of the Rio Grande, with soaring steel beams forming an imposing monument to his antiimmigrant agenda. Trump brandished a Sharpie and signed his autograph on a piece of the wall.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., who traveled with the president Tuesday, spent four hours with him Friday helping to orchestrate the border wall trip and other events later this week. The objective, Graham said, is to give Trump daily obligations in his final full week as president and to “not look back on the past.”
“We’ve laid out a plan for him, every day to do something,” Graham said.
The Rio Grande Valley continues to be the busiest section of the border for illegal crossings. Although U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified these sections as its top priority for border wall construction, the Trump administration ended up building relatively few miles of new barriers there.
A major impediment to construction efforts in the Rio Grande Valley has been resistance from local landowners. Most of the land the government needed to build new barriers is privately owned. In addition, some of the locations are on river levees, which adds to the expense and difficulty of construction.
Instead, the administration has built hundreds of miles of barrier on public lands farther west, where the government already controlled the land but where there are comparatively fewer migrant crossings than in the Rio Grande Valley.
David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, said the irony of Trump’s border-wall visit Tuesday was that the Capitol attack showed the more serious danger to the country comes from some of his own supporters, not from foreign migrants.
“Rather than the threat being from Mexicans and Central Americans and people that cross the southwest border, we’ve seen evidence that the threat comes from within,” Lapan said. “The only thing he’s done about that threat is encourage it.”