“What a lot of crap. What a lot of crap,” Trump said of using the word “insurrection” to refer to Jan. 6
During a rally for Republican Harriet Hageman, former President Donald Trump referred to “the insurrection hoax” in front of an unpopulated arena. Rep. Liz Cheney, an anti-Trump congresswoman, is challenging Hageman in a primary (R-Wyo.).
“As one of the leading proponents of the insurrection hoax, Liz Cheney has pushed a grotesquely false, fabricated, hysterical, partisan narrative, and that was the narrative of the day,” he said. Seven people died in connection with the very real attack, according to a bipartisan Senate investigation.
Trump is likely targeting Cheney’s race as part of a personal vendetta. Cheney is one of only two Republicans on the panel looking into the Capitol attack.
Following the insurgency, Cheney also voted to impeach Trump. “She has gone crazy… Totally crazy,” Trump said of the congresswoman, according to Rolling Stone.
Before Trump took the stage, Hageman addressed the crowd. The candidate warned her supporters that Democrats will “turn the greatest country on earth into a third-world failure.”
But one of Hageman’s biggest applause lines came when she said, “We’re fed up with the Jan. 6 commission and those people who think they can gaslight us,” one in a long list of right-wing conservative complaints that ended with, “We’re fed up with Liz Cheney.”
Trump targeted Cheney multiple times throughout the speech, at times invoking her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, in his attacks. “The Cheneys along with George Bush didn’t even pardon Scooter Libby… Do you know who did? I did. … I gave Scooter Libby a pardon.
They couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it,” he said, adding, “Scooter Libby got screwed.” Libby is Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, and she was convicted of lying to the FBI during the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media. (Libby, on the other hand, appears to have no ill will against the congresswoman, having donated to Cheney’s 2022 campaign.)
Trump attempted to link Liz Cheney to her father once more, this time by showing a manipulated photograph of the congresswoman with George W. Bush’s face.
The crowd had seen the image earlier in the day. “The Cheneys have never met a war they didn’t like,” Trump said before the image came up on the screen, purporting that when he was in office, “We were respected. Nobody was going to war with us. We didn’t have to go to war for people to know we were the toughest and the strongest.”
Throughout the speech, Trump kept returning to the subject of Jan. 6. “Now you look at the so-called word insurrection. Jan. 6. What a lot of crap. What a lot of crap,” Trump said. But the word insurrection is defined as “a violent uprising against an authority or government,” which certainly seems apt. But not according to Trump, who said the insurrection is “another con job just like Russia, Russia, Russia.”
“This was made up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, a totally fake story,” he said. The former president then claimed he has been investigated more than Al Capone and a list of other infamous criminals in history.
“Don’t forget: I’ve been investigated more than Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the great legendary mobster Alphonse Capone, did anyone ever hear of him? Al Capone,” Trump said. “If you add them all up and double them and triple them, I’ve taken the cake for investigations.”
Trump took a quick break from criticizing Cheney to boast about the size of the crowd at the rally preceding the Jan. 6 attack and declare that the Mueller investigation was the worst coup attempt in US history.
After attacking his political opponents and boasting about his tweets for more than an hour and a half, Trump spared a few comments, but little more, for the victims of the Uvalde shooting.
“Before we build around the world, we should build safe schools for our own children, in our own country, and in our own towns,” Trump added, suggesting that buildings can prevent shootings more efficiently than gun reform.
The Wyoming rally came the day after Trump delivered a speech at the National Rifle Association convention in which he recited the names of the Uvalde school shooting victims and ended with a dance.
