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Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that he sounded the alarm about the need for security ahead of the 2021 Capitol riot, claiming it could have been “an absolutely lovely day.”
Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity there was “a lot of love” when he spoke to the crowd at an Ellipse rally preceding the siege on the Capitol. He also blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the lack of security.
“Believe me, there was a lot of love and a lot of friendship and people that love our country,” the Republican said of the crowd at his speech.
“These are great people. And I felt there was going to be a very big crowd there and I said ‘you know, I think we should have 10,000.’”
Trump claimed to have met with top officials in “military and other places” about what he anticipated would be a large crowd. After speeches, many attendees marched on the Capitol and disrupted the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
The former president repeated a Republican accusation that claimed Pelosi turned down the option of deploying the National Guard ahead of the rally, during which Trump claims he won the election despite a lack of evidence. Trump claimed he wanted soldiers or National Guard members at the ready but Pelosi “turned it down.”
“And if she didn’t turn it down, we would not have had any problem it would have just been absolutely a lovely day,” Trump said.
In a wide-ranging interview, the 45th president largely criticized Biden and bashed his successor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic – even attributing vaccine hesitancy to people’s feelings about the current commander-in-chief.
“We did such a great job,” Trump said of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis after host Sean Hannity noted more Americans died from the virus in 2021 than 2020. “We haven’t been getting the credit we deserve.”
Trump said his administration left Biden with vaccines and therapeutics.
“But they haven’t known how to use them and I think that people don’t trust them,” he said. “I don’t think they trust Biden, they don’t trust the administration and that’s why they’re not taking them to the extent that they should be.”
Trump also bashed Biden’s foreign policy, including the Afghanistan withdrawal and joined a pile-on the president about comments he made during a Wednesday press conference about the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden had implied that the international response to a Russian attack might not be unified in the case of what he called “a minor incursion.”
Biden and the White House later clarified and walked back that comment amid scrutiny.
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