In Donald Trump Impeachment Part Deux, we’ve seen a creative re-write of the riot on January 6th that began while the president was speaking two miles away at a Save America rally.
Congressional reps, acting as impeachment managers at the Senate trial, attempted to sell the idea that the people who assaulted the Capitol were “President Trump’s mob” and that the president knew these people would attempt to violently breach the building because Trump encouraged them to “fight like hell.”
Notwithstanding that many of those arrested at the Capitol riot didn’t vote and were both Democrat and Republican (and at least one guy with Black Lives Matter), Trump ostensibly so moved “his mob” that they started the attack before he finished his “incendiary” speech.
You may be as disgusted as the rest of us were with the attempted sacking of the Capitol, but if Trump knew that “his mob” — which had never rioted at any of his rallies before — was planning a riot, he sure didn’t let on. The man who was criticized for sending in an “occupying force” and “adding gasoline to a fire” for protecting federal buildings in Oregon had suddenly done a complete 180 and was now perfectly fine with riots at federal buildings. And Democrats, who had cheered on the spring, summer, and fall riots had now themselves done a complete turnaround by suddenly declaring riots an insurrection and bad.
Let’s just say these things stretch credulity.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi amplified the managers’ claim that Trump knew in advance about the mob attack.
President Trump spent weeks laying the groundwork for Jan. 6th to halt the counting of electoral college ballots, incited a mob to “fight like hell” & assault the Capitol, then refused to intervene to stop the attack.
Give Pelosi some points for chutzpah. The one person who could have done something to buttress the security at the Capitol complex and didn’t – Pelosi – and whose police force had been informed by the feds that there might be trouble, now blames the president for the attack. Furthermore, she accused him of not stopping it once it started, though he was still speaking to a rally two miles away.
President Trump spent weeks laying the groundwork for Jan. 6th to halt the counting of electoral college ballots, incited a mob to “fight like hell” & assault the Capitol, then refused to intervene to stop the attack. https://t.co/DaoY32bYU2
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) February 10, 2021
Trump’s Defense Brief Eviscerates the Democrats’ Case for Impeachment
But, for my money, the biggest whopper of Day 2 of Impeachment Part Deux came when Pelosi tried to set the table for the message of the day by tweeting that Trump’s talk of “fighting like hell” was the incitement for the riot.
As The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York pointed out, these were Trump’s words on January 6th about “fighting like hell.”
Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait. I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9:00 in the evening and say “I want to thank you very much” and go off to some other life, but I said, “something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.
The 'fight like hell' passage from Trump's January 6 speech. pic.twitter.com/Tej4wNVXZU
— Byron York (@ByronYork) February 10, 2021
Suddenly, the Twitterati went into hyperdrive and found copious examples of Democrats, including House impeachment managers, saying they’d “fight like hell” though, oddly, no one had ever complained about the incendiary nature of those words when they uttered them.
In 2017, House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said, “We’ve [got] to wake up every day and fight like hell for liberal democracy…”
FLASHBACK: Rep. Jamie Raskin in 2017:
“We’ve to wake up every day and fight like hell for liberal democracy, not just in Maryland, not just in the United States, but all over the world…" https://t.co/fgp3VOneBF
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) February 10, 2021
Here’s Raskin again saying in 2019 that Donald Trump had so “corrupted” the courts that “nothing is normal” and Americans should “prepare for the worst and go fight like hell for the Constitution.”
FLASHBACK: Rep. Jamie Raskin in an interview with the Atlantic in 2019:
"Let’s hope for the best, be prepared for the worst, and go fight like hell…" pic.twitter.com/Z3jlfH10Er
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) February 10, 2021
Wait, Is Jamie Raskin Impeaching Trump for Doing the Same Thing Raskin Himself Did in 2017?!
And in 2020, Jamie Raskin did it again, urging people to “fight like hell” to stop this “assault on health care and the Constitution.” Them’s fighting words, apparently.
FLASHBACK: Rep. Jamie Raskin on September 23, 2020:
"We must fight like hell…" pic.twitter.com/nN2KnJxJY2
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) February 10, 2021
Eric Swalwell, who was brought on as a House impeachment manager even though he had been embroiled with a Chinese spy, previously talked of “fighting like hell.”
When Democrats were pushing the whopper that President Trump was “stealing” mailboxes to make it harder to vote by mail, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who promulgated that lie, said he would – you guessed it – “fight like hell to make sure postal workers and letter carriers can deliver every ballot!”
@wweek confirmed that the Trump administration is stealing @USPS mailboxes. I can't believe Trump is making it harder to send mail & vote in November. We’re going to fight like hell to make sure postal workers & letter carriers can deliver every ballot! https://t.co/ctukyqD8i4
— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) August 13, 2020
And the GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee wanted to know if Joe Biden saying he’d “fight like hell” was somehow incendiary.
Incitement? pic.twitter.com/J8RPba1IHv
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) February 10, 2021
It turns out that words are only incendiary if Donald Trump says them.
Victoria Taft is the host of “The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it here. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, MeWe, Minds @VictoriaTaft
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