Trump blew up his Jan. 6 defense by boasting about himself on Fox News: analysis

Donald Trump accidentally blew up his Jan. 6 defense during an interview with Fox News host Greg Gutfield, according to an analysis.

The former president told the late-night talk show host Wednesday about a phone call he supposedly made to Tim Walz, who is now Kamala Harris' running mate, several years ago where he claimed the Minnesota governor asked for help dispersing hostile protesters carrying American flags – and Washington Post columnist Philip Bump noted that Trump understood the power he has over his supporters.

"This was during the riots and everything,” Trump told Gutfeld. “They were MAGA people, you know, they like the American flag, all right, and they also had Trump [flags].”

Walz asked Trump, who was president at the time, to tell the protesters he was their friend, so he got on Twitter and asked them to stand down.

“I put out a statement: ‘He’s a good man, the governor. He’s on our side. I don’t, I didn’t know him, but I didn’t want him to get hurt,’” Trump said, "and everybody put down their flags and they left. It was sort of a beautiful thing in a lot of ways.”

Walz said in 2021 that he called the White House the previous April, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to ask exactly what Trump was asking him to do by tweeting "liberate Minnesota," which he said “brought armed people to my house," and Bump pointed out that pro-Trump protesters had also gathered outside the governor's mansion on Jan. 6, 2021.

"That day, of course, Trump was in Washington," Bump wrote. "He’d stoked the anger of his base repeatedly in the weeks after the 2020 presidential contest, telling them that the election had been stolen (it hadn’t been) and that there were mechanisms by which he could retain the presidency (there weren’t). It was his rhetoric about the pandemic turned to the maximum volume: repeated presentations of how he wanted the world to be that his base accepted as factual — and actionable."

Trump repeatedly encouraged the Jan. 6 protest that erupted into chaos and violence at the U.S. Capitol, Bump wrote, but he ignored the pleas of family members, staffers and congressional allies to call off the mob of his supporters, but instead he watched the riot on TV for more than two hours before finally releasing a video calling them to disband – but also praising them.

"If we take Trump at his word in the 'Gutfeld!' conversation, he had seen how, in May 2020, his words encouraged protesters to threaten a Democratic official and he had seen how he could quickly dispel that threat," Bump wrote. "If this is true, if this is how Trump understood his power to work, it casts the Capitol riot in much darker terms. He should have known both how people would respond to his calls to action and requests to stand down."

Even if his anecdote isn't true, Bump wrote, he almost certainly was aware that he was being blamed for provoking the armed protest outside the Minnesota governor's residence, and Trump never responded to Walz's request for clarity on the "liberate" tweet.

"When Trump claims to have been an innocent observer on Jan. 6, as when he claimed falsely during the debate that he 'had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech,'" Bump wrote, "it’s worth bearing all of this in mind. He’d seen what his rhetoric could do and he claims that he had the power to do more."