Target.
It’s weird yet apparently true that the revelation most material to the charge of incitement that emerged yesterday happened after the day’s proceedings were over, not during the House Dems’ presentation. And it came from one of the Trumpiest Republicans in the Senate, not from Pelosi’s crew. It has to do with what Trump knew and when, exactly, about the threat to Mike Pence’s life after the mob launched its attack on the Capitol on January 6. Trump’s team insists that he never wanted his fans at the rally to get violent with Congress, even telling them at one point in his remarks that morning that they should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Stipulate for argument’s sake that that’s true, that he didn’t want them to get rough — even though some of his own aides claim otherwise: As for the siege, an adviser said Trump wanted to see a show of force from his supporters that day. “Trump likes force,” one adviser said. “He saw people forcefully fighting for him,” the adviser added. That lines up with what a former senior White House official told CNN about Trump’s reaction to the siege. The official said Trump was “loving” watching the mob. That jibes with Ben Sasse’s claim that White House officials told him the then-president was “delighted” with the spectacle. But let’s say that he didn’t foresee them breaking into the building and roughing people up, never mind that he warned on Twitter the night before that thousands of his fans were coming to town and “won’t stand” to see the election stolen from him. What about after they had broken in and began roughing people up, chanting “Hang Mike Pence”? What did he want to see happen at that point? Because he was famously slow that day to hop onto Twitter and try to call the mob off. Enter new GOP senator and MAGA fan Tommy Tuberville, who was chatty with reporters after yesterday’s Democratic presentation: Sen. Tommy Tuberville revealed late Wednesday that he spoke to Donald Trump on Jan.6, just as a violent mob closed in on the Senate, and informed the then-president directly that Vice President Mike Pence had just been evacuated from the chamber. “I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Tuberville (R-Ala.) told POLITICO on Capitol Hill on Wednesday night, saying he cut the phone call short amid the chaos.
