Trump brags about his Jan. 6 crowd size and admits 'regret' over not joining march on the Capitol

In a wide-ranging interview on Wednesday at his Mar-a-Lago resort, former President Donald Trump said he regrets not marching with his supporters to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, asserted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should have exercised powers she does not have to end the deadly insurrection and rejected the suggestion that he could have done anything to quell the violence.

The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey reports that Trump told him during a 45-minute interview, "I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”

In the interview, Dawsey writes that Trump "struck a defiant posture, refusing to say whether he would testify before a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault. Trump said he didn’t remember 'getting very many' phone calls that day, and he denied removing call logs or using burner phones."

Speaking Wednesday afternoon at his his palatial beachfront club, the former president said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day.Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute," he said.

The former president praised organizers of the rally, some of whom have now received subpoenas from federal authorities, and repeatedly bragged about the size of the crowd on the Ellipse, when questioned about the events of Jan. 6.

“The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures,” he said. “But this was a tremendous crowd.”

Ever the showman, Trump teased about whether he will again run for the White House. “I don’t want to comment on running, but I think a lot of people are going to be very happy by my decision," he said, adding: "Because it’s a little boring now.”