He 'assembled a mob': Senator finds Trump's rhetoric complaints 'quite odd'

Former President Donald Trump has sought to use the second assassination attempt against himself in two months to go after Vice President Kamala Harris and her supporters, claiming without any evidence that they incited the plots by criticizing his agenda as dangerous to American democracy.

But this makes no sense coming from Trump, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday — particularly since on Jan. 6, Trump whipped up a crowd into a frenzy with election conspiracy theories, just as a mob was preparing to storm the Capitol and attack police officers to stop the election certification, and he took hours to make any kind of statement calling them off.

"We just played a clip of him at a rally in Long Island and saying, you know, don't, don't call your opponent, say your opponent is going to end democracy, and then he immediately said, she's going to destroy the country," said Cooper.

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"Well, it's interesting," said Kelly, a veteran and former astronaut whose wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, was severely injured in a 2011 mass shooting during a heightened period of political threats. "I mean, it comes from a guy who, shortly after I got sworn into the U.S. Senate, assembled a mob in Washington, D.C., and then spoke to that mob and instructed them to go to Capitol Hill because he didn't like how the election turned out."

"So it's, you know, it's quite odd to hear those words come out of his mouth, but we've seen this before," said Kelly, who recently tore into Trump for his controversial event at Arlington National Cemetery. "We've seen this for over a decade. The way he uses language to divide the American people. And it's really uncalled for. And it's dangerous."

"I would hope that, going forward here, he rethinks how he's using this language to divide us," Kelly continued.

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