The rioters were adamant when they stormed the US Capitol: Joe Biden and the Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Congress wasn't doing anything to stop it, so it was up to patriotic Americans like themselves to save the country.
The months of lies and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by President Trump was designed to inflame, enrage, motivate. His words and actions for months directly led to an armed and deadly insurrection at the Capitol. He can't argue that nobody took him seriously or that his words didn't provoke violence.
"You'll never take back our country with weakness," Trump told his fanatics at the January 6 rally, which took place as Congress was convening to finalize Biden's victory. "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We're going to have to fight much harder. After this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down - we're going to walk down."
At the end of the 70-minute speech that was riddled with grievances and falsehoods about the election, Trump said: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
Days after the failed coup, the House of Representatives charged Trump with "incitement of insurrection." The single article of impeachment accused Trump of having "repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State of Federal officials." It also accused him of having "willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged - and foreseeably resulted in - lawless action at the Capitol."
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Business Insider 01/22/2021
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