Of the many unsettling things Donald Trump did during his presidency, one of the most dangerous occurred on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged his followers to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building and make their voices heard.
“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the amped-up crowd that had gathered in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
When hundreds of Trump supporters eventually did make their way to the Capitol, then violently force their way inside the building, their fearless leader was nowhere to be found. And has quietly spent much of the last year attempting to distance himself from the violence that erupted following his so-called “Fight Like Hell” speech, which Trump swears was “extremely calming.” Meanwhile, more than 730 people have been charged with a variety of crimes related to the events that day, and they want to know what happened to the solidarity their president promised them.
As the Daily Beast reports, the former president is being called out by Edward Jacob Lang, a 26-year-old insurrectionist who feels betrayed by the former anarchist-in-chief. On Wednesday, Lang—who was arrested nearly a year ago on more than a half-dozen charges after attacking officers on January 6th and beating them with a bat—spoke with bounty hunter-turned-conservative shock jock Stew Peters and expressed his annoyance.
“I am so disappointed in Trump for canceling his January 6th press conference,” Lang, who claimed to be on the verge of tears, told Peters. He’s extremely bothered by Trump’s refusal to stand up for defendants like him, who he described as “January 6 political prisoners.”
“It just shows how far we have fallen,” Lang said. “Where is our rally tomorrow? … [T]here should be a hundred thousand people in D.C. tomorrow at the very minimum… President Trump, where are you? … We are rotting in jail because we stood up for what you told us to stand up for!”
Peters, too, expressed his dismay at Trump canceling his January 6th press conference. “We had hoped that Trump would address all of the evidence that the chaos of January 6th was orchestrated by agent provocateurs,” he said. “Instead, Mar-a-Lago has signaled today a surrender of the narrative.”
Unfortunately for Trump and the hundreds of those who rioted in his honor, surrendering the narrative is sometimes the only move you’re left with when the “evidence” that the chaos was caused by someone else simply does not exist.
(Via Daily Beast)