Former Chairman of the House Oversight Committee and current Fox News contributor Trey Gowdy appeared on the show earlier today and lasted all of three minutes before losing it over questions of whether Trump incited the mob that attack Capitol Hill yesterday.
Gowdy spoke to anchor Sandra Smith about the mayhem that broke out on Capitol Hill on the afternoon of Jan. 6th as both the Senate and the House of Representatives prepared to meet to ratify the Electoral College votes of each state which would declare Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election. MAGA followers working with QAnon leaders stormed the capitol building, barreling through police barricades to ransack the building in a truly disturbing attempt to hold Congress hostage and contest the results of the election. And they did so, in part, because Trump encouraged them to.
The president held a rally that same day in D.C., urging his supporters to “march to the Capitol,” telling them “you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.” For Gowdy, that seemed like a clear-cut invitation to do violence in his name, but the political analyst lost it a bit when Smith appeared to be naive to the implications of Trump’s words.
“I don’t know how reasonably foreseeable it should be for cops that tens of thousands of people are going to be told to go fight, that an election was stolen from them, to go fight, to blame Mike Pence and Tommy Cotton and Ken Buck and other Republicans…” Gowdy responded when Smith questioned why the security around the Capitol seemed to be lacking.
The anchor interrupted him, asking “Who told them to do that?”
And that’s when Gowdy had had enough.
“Did you listen to the president’s speech yesterday?” he asked incredulously. “Then you tell me. Who said that? Who said go fight? Who blamed Mike Pence and blamed Republicans and said the election was stolen?”
Gowdy went on to bemoan the future of the Republican party, insisting these terrorists needed to be punished to the full extent of the law and speculating what this insurrection means for the upcoming inauguration in a fairly off-the-cuff, frank talk. He also encouraged people to help the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in their search for those who broke the law yesterday and urged his fellow Republicans to step up when it comes to quelling the misplaced civil unrest that led us here.