Hours after a mob of his supporters breached the US Capitol at his own prompting, President Donald Trump urged them in a video to “go home” while fanning their misplaced grievances about a stolen election.
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump said, his words offering little to placate a crowd he has lied to about the results of November’s presidential contest.
“You have to go home now. We have to have peace,” Trump said, several hours after the doors of the Capitol building were breached, his own vice president was evacuated and multiple police offers were injured in the mob violence. “We have to have law and order.”
The minute-long video, taped from the White House Rose Garden, was hardly the forceful denunciation of the violence that nearly every one of the President’s allies and advisers were encouraging him to deliver.
It came hours after he told a crowd of supporters gathered on the Ellipse near the White House that he planned to march with them to the Capitol building, though he ultimately skipped the march and hunkered in the White House.
It was a minimal attempt to rein in the rioting that he spurred himself. Instead, the President seemed interested in conveying shared injustice about an election he claims, wrongly, was stolen.
“It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country,” he said.
Trump had spent the afternoon between the Oval Office and the adjoining dining room, watching scenes of anarchy and violence play out at the Capitol building across town.
Encouraged by many of his advisers to speak out, Trump was initially resistant. He was focused instead on Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to carry out his futile demand to overturn the election.
Pence, who was presiding over the tally of the Electoral College votes as the Capitol was breached, was evacuated from the building.
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