On Friday's edition of MSNBC's "The Beat," historian Michael Beschloss outlined how the new evidence emphasizes how former President Donald Trump was actively rooting for violence on January 6.
This comes after the last scheduled public hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the attack revealed new footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling to ask for help from the National Guard from inside the Capitol as rioters began to breach the complex.
"I think the biggest question here is ... you've got Schumer and Pelosi begging the governors of Virginia and Maryland — it's not even their jurisdiction — to send in armed forces to restore public safety to the United States Capitol because the president of the United States wouldn't do it," said Beschloss. "He was sitting in the room off the Oval Office. He was watching TV. And by most accounts, enjoying the violence and enjoying the fact that so many people seemed to be demonstrating on his behalf."
"Here's the question," said Beschloss. "If you would have this kind of riot, this kind of violence at the Capitol, an obvious attack on Congress and the Capitol building, and the lives of Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence, members of Congress were in imminent danger. They were a couple of minutes from being killed ... they were a few minutes away from a hostage crisis. Where they could have taken leaders of Congress in and put them on TV and said, we're not going to let this person out until Donald Trump is reinstated as president and serves for the next four years. You don't know what was going to happen."
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No other president could ever have dreamed of doing this, said Beschloss, citing George H. W. Bush as an example: "Let's say there had been an attack on Congress in the Capitol when he had been president, would he have been hands off?"
"Donald Trump is the only president in the history of the United States who if this had happened, would have been so hands off and perfectly fine with letting the danger of imminent assassinations and a hostage situation," said Beschloss. "He didn't do it because he didn't want those things to happen, he did it because he wanted violence, because he thought that was a way of staying in office."
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Michael Beschloss says Trump "wanted violence" on January 6www.youtube.com
