Trump Says His 'Fight Like Hell' Speech Before Capitol Riot Was Actually 'Extremely Calming'

Former President Donald Trump denied riling up the crowd at his Stop the Steal rally that preceded the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I have nothing to hide,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday night. “I wasn’t involved in that and if you look at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming, actually.”

Let’s take a look at some of those “extremely calming” words from the speech he delivered on Jan. 6:

• “And we fight. We fight like hell And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
• “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing … We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
• “Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about … We will stop the steal.”
• “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

Trump went on to tell Ingraham that the insurrection was just “a protest,” not an insurrection. “It was a protest,” he said. “The insurrection took place on Nov. 3, which was Election Day. This was a protest and a lot of innocent people are being hurt. A lot of innocent people are being injured.” So far, more than 700 people have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol.

The former president also addressed the ongoing congressional investigation into the events of Jan. 6. Trump has made the claim that executive privilege protects his communications and records from being subpoenaed. And he has bullied his allies into stonewalling the committee with those same executive privilege claims or by invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to self-incriminate.

Trump, who told Ingraham that he had “nothing to hide,” claimed he was just standing up for executive privilege on principle, somehow implying that Biden, too, secretly wants his executive privilege upheld — even though Biden has rejected Trump’s privilege claims on documents subpoenaed by the committee and defended that stance in court. “The biggest loser would be Biden, because if it ever changes, and I think it will, then he won’t be able to use it with respect to Hunter [Biden] and all of the things that are going on that are so terrible. So I would think that he’d want to see this upheld, frankly,” Trump said. But he did not provide details as to what those alleged “terrible” things are.

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