For most of the hour-long session, the former president barely mentioned President Biden. Instead, he spent his time denying the results of the “rigged” 2020 election; railing against “stupid people” who refuse to acknowledge his victory; promising to pardon “many” of those convicted of committing crimes on Jan. 6, 2021; calling the Capitol Police officer who shot a rioter while protecting members of Congress a “thug”; claiming that Mike Pence was not in any danger from the rioters and had the power as vice president to overturn the election results; defending his “perfect” phone call asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes”; defending his Truth Social post calling for “termination” of the Constitution; justifying his own mishandling of classified information while claiming that Biden stored classified documents in D.C.’s Chinatown, “where they don’t even speak English”; rehashing and justifying his “Access Hollywood” comments; and calling CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins a “nasty person.”
When he did venture into public policy, it was to say that he would restore family separations at the southern border (“When you say to a family that if you come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come”) and to urge Republicans to “do a default” on the national debt (“You might as well do it now because … you’re going to default eventually anyway”) — a catastrophic move that would give Biden the pretext to shift blame for his ruinous economic policies onto Republicans.
