ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump now claims that the domestic terrorists he pardoned who violently attacked police officers during his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt were actually the victims of that day.
“I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” he said in a half-hour news conference with the reporters traveling with him on his flight to the Super Bowl on Sunday.
“That’s who were assaulted and they were treated unfairly. There’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” he continued. “So no, I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”
Trump set free hundreds of his followers who had been convicted of assaulting police on Jan. 6 as part of his attempt to overturn the election he had lost and remain in office. That group was among the nearly 1,600 total pardons for Jan. 6 cases Trump issued on his first day in office, which included about 1,000 nonviolent offenders and about 200 accused police assaulters whose cases were still pending.
More than 140 police officers defending the Capitol from Trump’s mob were injured that day, some gravely. One died hours later, and four more died by suicide in the coming months. The mob’s behavior, using violence or the threat of violence to effect political change, is the definition of terrorism. And using violence or the threat of violence to remain in power, authoritarian experts say, meets the definition of a self-coup.
Trump, nevertheless, continues to claim he is a great supporter of law enforcement. His White House staff arranged for him to meet with police officers who responded to the New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans an hour before the start of Sunday’s game.
But the president had played golf with Tiger Woods at Trump’s West Palm Beach course Sunday morning and arrived in New Orleans about a half hour behind schedule. It is unclear exactly how this affected the tightly orchestrated Super Bowl pregame program, but Trump wound up spending less than two minutes on the field with the police officers and victims of the attack.
In the news conference ― which Trump aides announced with just 10 minutes notice so he could boast about his renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as Air Force 1 flew over it — Trump also repeated his previous claims that Canada was “not a viable country” and should be taken over by the United States; that Greenland should also be taken over by the United States; and that the Gaza Strip would be “owned” by the United States and its two million residents moved elsewhere.
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He again expressed support for Elon Musk’s rampage against federal agencies on his behalf, repeating, without evidence, that the multibillionaire had found rampant fraud. “We have tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse, and theft, by the way,” he said.
Trump also repeated attacks on federal judges who have put a pause on Musk’s attempts to unilaterally cancel congressionally mandated spending or even shut down entire agencies. “No judge, frankly, should be allowed to make that kind of a decision. It’s a disgrace,” he said.
His own vice president, J.D. Vance, has also stated that judges should not be able to override the executive branch — a view that runs counter to more than 220 years of established constitutional law. Three years ago, Vance stated that Trump, were he to win back the White House, should emulate President Andrew Jackson’s possibly apocryphal defiance of the Supreme Court. “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said in a podcast interview.
When asked Sunday whether he agreed with his vice president, Trump claimed not to understand the question. “I don’t know even what you’re talking about,” he said. “Neither do you.”
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Upon learning that the questioner worked for HuffPost, Trump, as he does frequently, went on to insult the publication. “I thought they died,” he said. “Are they still around? I haven’t read them in years. I thought they died.”
Trump similarly attacked Time magazine last week, asking if they were “still in business” in response to a new cover showing Musk sitting at Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. Barely a month earlier, he had said being named Time’s person of the year was a “tremendous honor.”
