Former President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he lost to Joe Biden due to fraud.
Former President Donald Trump told reporters he wanted the same thing that members of the mob during the violent Jan.6 Capitol riot wanted: overturning the election of President Joe Biden. «Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,» Trump said of the rioters, according to an article Monday in Vanity Fair that excerpts the new book «I Alone Can Fix It,» by Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The former president downplayed the deadly violence at the Capitol that day, while repeating several lies and erroneous claims about the integrity of the election, according to the article. «They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before,» Trump told the two reporters during an interview in late March at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. «There’s tremendous proof. There’s tremendous proof. Statistically, it wasn’t even possible that [Biden] won. Things such as, if you win Florida and Ohio and Iowa, there’s never been a loss,» he said. Trump also claimed in the interview that Capitol Police welcomed members of the mob that day into the halls of Congress, and warmly greeted them after thousands of his supporters marched from a rally outside the White House, where he had urged them to fight against the confirmation of Biden’s win by Congress. «In all fairness, the Capitol Police were ushering people in,» Trump said. «The Capitol Police were very friendly. They were hugging and kissing. You don’t see that. There’s plenty of tape on that,» he said in the article, headlined: «‘I’m Getting the Word Out’: Inside the Feverish Mind of Donald Trump Two Months After Leaving the White House.» The article notes that «Trump didn’t mention the countless accounts of horrific violence — that of a riotous mob shoving a police officer to the ground, later threatening to shoot him with his own gun, or that of an insurrectionist bashing a flagpole into another police officer’s chest, or that of yet another officer howling in pain as he was compressed in a closing door.
