Donald Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago this week where he told a crowd “a peaceful transfer of power” occurred in 2021 provoked a Washington Post columnist to ponder: is the former president “deceptive or delusional?”
The truth, Colbert King wrote in a column published Friday in the Post, is that the insurrection that paralyzed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 “was anything but that.”
“The assault on Congress was the most seditious attack on the American democratic process in history, and Trump was the cause of it all,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist wrote.
While Trump has tried to float the idea that it was "love and peace,” King noted that “pesky things called facts suggest otherwise.”
He went on to describe in granular detail how the events of Jan. 6 unfolded to the point where “all hell broke loose.”
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“Their goal was to halt the constitutionally prescribed proceeding. And they succeeded,” he wrote.
“For the first time in U.S. history, the peaceful transfer of power was stopped dead in its tracks by insurrectionists who also forced panic-stricken members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to abandon their chambers and flee the Capitol, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) described in a floor speech after Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial,” King wrote.
He added that “since that Jan. 6 day of darkness, more than 1,500 people across the country have been charged with crimes related to the Capitol invasion.”
King concluded his piece with a quote from McConnell weeks after the attack where he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.”
“But Trump probably can’t even imagine people would think that of him. Not in the warped and narcissistic world where he dwells — which, if the American people put democracy first, will vote to keep this megalomaniac from returning to the White House.”