Donald Trump was given multiple chances to express regret for the way he handled January 6 during the first presidential debate. Instead, he took the opportunity to blame the entire would-be coup on Nancy Pelosi.
All of the stormers of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 were Trump supporters who had come to Washington, D.C. to attend a rally centered around the false claim that the election was being stolen from the former president. Still, Trump laid the blame for their eventual riot squarely on the shoulders of the ex-Speaker of the House, saying he asked his supporters to act “peacefully and patriotically.”
“I had nothing to do with that, other than they asked me to make a speech,” Trump said. “It wasn’t done by me, it was done by others.”
Trump repeated the debunked claim that he offered thousands of troops ahead of Jan. 6 and was rejected by Pelosi. He went on to claim that Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, has a tape where Pelosi admits that the Jan. 6 riots were her fault.
“Her daughter has a tape of her saying she is fully responsible for what happened,” Trump said. “It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor…did their jobs.”
There is no such clip in the documentary that Alexandra filmed around her mother.