Trump’s
actions that led to the violence at the Capitol began months ago
By
Jan. 13, 2021 at 3:18 p.m. CST
Republicans who have
lined up to support President Trump following the violence that occurred last
week at the U.S. Capitol in Washington have often sought to distance him from
the actions of his supporters by pointing to the speech he gave outside the
White House that morning.
“I know that everyone
here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and
patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said that morning. How could
anyone hold him responsible for what ensued?
Trump himself has
appealed to this argument, insisting Tuesday that nothing about his Jan. 6
speech suggested incitement. It was, like his call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, beyond reproach.
“It’s been analyzed,”
he said of the speech, “and people thought that what I said was totally
appropriate.”
Like that call with
Zelensky, which led to Trump’s impeachment in December 2019, though, the issue
is far broader than one speech or one conversation. The groundwork for what
occurred at the Capitol was established well before that day. In fact, it
stretches back months, to at least April, when Trump began raising questions
about the reliability of the 2020 presidential vote.
Trump’s supporters
raided the Capitol because he insisted that the election was stolen and that
something had to be done. This is the timeline of why they came to accept that
and how Trump fostered that belief. (Parts of this timeline come from Just Security’s overview of
the president’s actions.)
Before 2020: Since he
declared his candidacy, Trump has been reticent to overtly criticize those who
support him, regardless of their politics. That includes self-proclaimed
white-nationalist groups, whom Trump has criticized only when pressed and then
only with qualifiers. In March 2019, the Pew Research Center found that most
Americans believed Trump had done too little to distance himself from
self-described white nationalists. Self-proclaimed white-nationalist
groups expanded during his presidency.
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April: With the
emergence of the novel coronavirus and
infections surging nationally, states began rethinking how they would deal with
voting in the presidential primaries and in November’s general election. After
the state of Wisconsin postponed its primary elections, Trump lashed out at the
state and the shift to mail-in voting.
“Now, mail ballots —
they cheat,” Trump said April 7. “Okay? People cheat. Mail ballots are a very
dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. They go and collect
them. They’re fraudulent in many cases.”
Over the next few
months, the number of Republicans indicating that they would vote by mail declined.
May: On April 30,
protesters stormed the state Capitol in Michigan to protest measures aimed at
limiting the spread of the virus.
The next day, Trump
sided with the protesters on Twitter.
“The Governor of
Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” he wrote. “These are very
good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See
them, talk to them, make a deal.”
He had previously
offered the same sentiment on social media, calling obliquely for unnamed
people to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and other states, using revolutionary language to
describe opposition to stay-at-home orders and business closures. Trump’s
frustrations with those orders stemmed at least in part from his concern that
the closures would hurt the economy in the months before he sought reelection.
June: As the months passed,
Trump continued to elevate various fraud claims, generally ones detached from
any actual demonstrated wrongdoing. He claimed, for example, that mail-in
balloting would make the vote susceptible to a flood of votes sent from foreign
actors, a claim that was obviously nonsensical even at the time.
In late May and into
June, the country was wracked by another point of tension: protests centered on
the death of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement.
Some of those protests devolved into violence
and vandalism, which Trump used to amplify campaign rhetoric about the need to
protect the public. Over the ensuing months, Trump continued to link the
political left and Democrats to physical violence and opposition to the U.S.
government.
Trump and the Justice
Department repeatedly elevated the threat
posed by antifa, a loose-knit ideology whose adherents were at some protests.
Demonstrated violence by right-wing actors such as the Proud Boys or members of
the “boogaloo” movement, which advocates a second Civil War, was comparatively
downplayed.
July: During an interview with
Fox News that aired July 19, Trump declined to say that he would necessarily
accept the results of the election.
“I’m not going to
just say yes,” Trump replied. “I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time
either.”
At the same time, he
continued to make unfounded allegations about fraud.
“Mail-In Ballot fraud
found in many elections,” Trump tweeted July 10. “People are just now seeing
how bad, dishonest and slow it is. Election results could be delayed for
months. No more big election night answers? 1% not even counted in 2016.
Ridiculous! Just a formula for RIGGING an Election.”
Needless to say, this
was not an accurate presentation of mail-in balloting.
August: After Marjorie Taylor
Greene won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th District, Trump offered
her his explicit praise, despite Greene’s background, which included expressed
support for the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory. The theory holds, among
other things, that Trump is fighting a secret war against satanic pedophiles
who have infiltrated Democratic politics and Hollywood. In 2019, federal law
enforcement identified QAnon as one facet of a rising violent threat posted by
conspiracy-theory adherents.
On Aug. 19, Trump was
asked about QAnon directly. His response was similar to his past approach to
self-described white nationalists.
“Well, I don’t know
much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I
appreciate,” Trump said. “But I don’t know
much about the movement.”
By the end of August,
it was already clear that Trump’s efforts to mislead his base about the
November election posed a significant risk of
fomenting violence.
Violence had already
occurred, without Trump’s condemnation. He refused to condemn
Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenage Trump supporter accused of fatally shooting two
people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin.
“I guess it looks
like he fell and then they very violently attacked him, and it was something
we’re looking at right now and it’s under investigation,” Trump said. “I guess
he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed. But it’s under
investigation.”
September: A whistleblower from
within the Department of Homeland Security alleged that agency
leaders sought to downplay the risk posed by self-described white nationalists
and to emphasize the threat of left-wing actors. Trump continued his efforts to
cast mail balloting as rife with fraud.
In late September,
the president was asked if he would cede power peacefully.
“Get rid of the
ballots and you’ll have a very trans — we’ll have a very peaceful — ”
Trump replied, “There won’t be
a transfer, frankly,” he continued. “There’ll be a continuation.”
The “ballots” that
Trump wanted to get rid of were the mail ballots against which he had been
railing.
The next day, both he
and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany were given a chance to
reinforce that Trump would ensure a peaceful transition. Neither did.
“The president will
accept the results of a free and fair election,” McEnany stated — making a
peaceful transition contingent on Trump accepting the election as fair. A few
hours later, the president made clear that he didn’t plan to do so.
“We want to make sure
the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” he said.
During his first
debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Trump was asked to
condemn the presence of self-described white-nationalist and fascistic groups
that had shown up at some protests. He was asked explicitly to condemn the
Proud Boys.
“Proud Boys, stand
back and stand by,” Trump replied. “But I’ll tell
you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the
left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
The Proud Boys
quickly adopted the non-condemnation as an informal slogan.
October through Nov.
3: Trump
and his allies in conservative media ramp up their allegations that the
election results are at risk from fraudulent mail-in voting. The National
Republican Campaign Committee, for example, ran ads on Facebook shortly before
the election claiming that “Nancy Pelosi and radical Democrats are trying to
steal this election.”
During a town hall
interview with NBC News, Trump again defended QAnon.
“I know nothing about
it,” he said. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it
very hard, but I know nothing about it.”
This is whitewashing,
at best: QAnon adherents accuse a wide array of political actors of being
pedophiles, meaning that their “fight” against pedophilia is really an effort
to impugn and attack people based on politics.
“I’ll tell you what I
do know about,” Trump added: “I know about antifa, and I know about the radical
left. And I know how violent they are and how vicious they are.”
When a group of Trump
supporters surrounded Biden’s campaign bus, nearly forcing it off the road,
Trump praised them.
Election Day: When polls closed on
the evening of Nov. 3, Trump held leads in a number of swing states, a
predicted artifact of Republicans being more likely to vote on Election Day
itself. Democratic voters were more likely to cast mail ballots, meaning that
it took longer for those votes to be counted.
Early in the morning
of Nov. 4, Trump claimed that he had won the election, basing his claim on
those incomplete returns. He claimed that fraud was rampant and that he would
take his case to the Supreme Court.
November and
December: Trump
elevated a wide array of theories about fraud, none of which were
substantiated.
He suffered a number
of legal and political defeats. Courts rejected his claims about fraud tainting
the results. Vote tallies proved that Biden had won the presidency, and Trump’s
efforts to block the certification of those votes failed. His effort to
interfere with the casting of electoral votes in mid-December was similarly
futile.
But day after day,
Trump continued to allege that the election was stolen from him. He continued
to try to persuade state officials to overturn the obvious preferences of their
voters.
“If a Democrat
Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen, with proof of such
acts at a level never seen before,” Trump tweeted in December, “the Democrat
Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death. Mitch &
the Republicans do NOTHING, just want to let it pass. NO FIGHT!”
On Dec. 19, Trump
tweeted his support for protests in Washington on Jan. 6.
“Statistically
impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” Trump wrote. “Big protest in D.C.
on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Jan. 6, around
noon: Trump
begins speaking to the crowd gathered outside the White House. In attendance or
nearby are thousands of Trump supporters — and scores of QAnon supporters and
members of the Proud Boys and self-described white-nationalist groups.
“They want to steal
the election,” Trump told the crowd to cheers. “The radical left knows exactly
what they’re doing. They’re ruthless, and it’s time that somebody did something
about it.”
His comments about a
peaceful protest came early in the speech. Near the end, he was less gentle.
“Nobody until I came
along had any idea how corrupt our elections were,” Trump said. “… I said
something’s wrong here, something is really wrong.”
“And we fight. We
fight like hell,” he added. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going
to have a country anymore.”
He then told the
audience that “we” would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to “try
and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take
back our country.”
Within two hours, the
mob had broken into the Capitol. Trump, who did not walk with them to their
destination, watched the events unfold on a television in the White House. For
hours, he ignored entreaties from
his embattled allies in the Capitol and declined to act to ensure that the
building was secured.
While Vice President
Pence was being protected in a secure area in the building, Trump tweeted
additional encouragement to his supporters in the streets.
“Mike Pence didn’t
have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and
our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts,
not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously
certify,” Trump wrote. “USA demands the truth!”
“It took him a while
to appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham
(R-S.C.) said in an
interview. “The president saw these people as allies in his journey and
sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”
“My people are
peaceful,” Trump reportedly said at
another point. “My people aren’t thugs.”
All of this was
predictable. It derived from Trump’s insistences that he couldn’t have lost
fairly and his refusal to condemn the right-wing and racist fringe. He spent
months building up a sense that the election would be suspect and then spent
months claiming that it was. He told his supporters that they would need to
fight to overturn the election results.
Put succinctly, the
president declined to say he would ensure a peaceful transition of power. Then
he didn’t.
