One of the most interesting speeches Donald Trump has ever delivered came the day after the Jan. 6 attack. It stood out for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the outgoing president didn’t seem to agree with a word he was saying.
Reading carefully from a prepared text, and adding fewer ad-libbed lines than usual, the Republican declared on Jan. 7, “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.” He went on to describe the riot as a “heinous attack.”
As we’ve discussed, it was an odd message, delivered in an odd way, that was wildly at odds with everything the then-president seemed to believe about the rioters and their attack. Indeed, in the months that followed, Trump rejected everything he’d said on Jan. 7, eventually telling the public that the rioters were great “patriots,” worthy of celebration, who “represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country.”
This led to a series of questions, including the most obvious: Why did the Republican deliver a speech he disagreed with? The congressional investigation into Jan. 6 has already provided an answer: Trump came to believe his own cabinet might try to remove him from office through the 25th Amendment if he didn’t make these remarks, so he grudgingly made the comments.
But as it turns out, there’s still more to learn about this speech, including the parts of the prepared text he didn’t want to say out loud. NBC News reported:
Rep. Elaine Luria, who led part of the Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time public hearing last week, released a video Monday featuring previously unseen testimony about former President Donald Trump’s reluctance to condemn the violent actions of his supporters a day after the Capitol riot.
We learned from last week’s committee hearing that Trump didn’t want to tell the nation that the election was “over,” which was itself a notable peek into the then-president’s perspective. But yesterday’s release fleshed all of this out in even more detail with outtakes and with a copy of the hand-edited draft.
Some of the changes are anodyne. The original text, for example, began with the words, “Good afternoon,” and the then-president struck that out. It also was written to have him say that he was “outraged and sickened” by the violence from the day before, but Trump preferred to simply say “outraged.”
But the speechwriters’ draft also read, “I want to be very clear, you do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.” These sentences were crossed out.
Even more importantly, Trump was also supposed to say, “I am directing the Department of Justice to ensure all law breakers are prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We must send a clear message not with mercy but with JUSTICE. Legal consequences must be swift and firm.” If these words sound unfamiliar it’s because he didn’t deliver any of them: Trump took his pen and took out this portion altogether. Mr. Law and Order simply wasn’t comfortable talking about holding the rioters legally responsible for the violence they perpetrated in his name. Asked why lines like these were crossed out, Jared Kushner told investigators, “I don’t know.” Perhaps not, but I think reasonable observers could probably take a guess.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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