With one exaggerated anecdote, Trump kneecaps his Jan. 6 defense

Donald Trump’s tough-guy shtick plays well on Fox News, so he leaned into it during an appearance on the late-night talk show “Gutfeld!” on Wednesday.

Host Greg Gutfeld brought up Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket. Trump, the Republican nominee, quickly disparaged Walz as “strange.” And then he told a story aimed at presenting Walz as weak and himself as strong — though with a notable unintended consequence.

“You know, he called up years ago,” Trump began, referring to Walz. The governor’s mansion in Minnesota was surrounded by protesters, Trump said, and Walz was seeking help.

“‘My house is being surrounded by people with American flags,’” Trump claimed Walz said. “I said, ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ He said, ‘I think they’re going to attack me.’”

Gutfeld guffawed.

“But this was during the riots and everything,” Trump continued. “They were MAGA people, you know, they like the American flag, all right? And they also had Trump [flags].”

Walz, Trump said, asked Trump to tell people that he was their friend. So Trump got on Twitter.

“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.”

He later added, “It was sort of a beautiful thing in a lot of ways.”

On the surface, this story doesn’t make sense, as it didn’t when Trump told it (also on Fox News) soon after Harris picked Walz. For example: There were pro-Trump protesters at the governor’s mansion in Minnesota in the midst of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests?

Trump did mention Walz in one tweet at the time — the infamous one in which he warned, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” His mention of Walz was simply that “the Military was with him all the way.”

As it happens, Walz described his end of this exchange to reporters from Politico in 2021. As the governor describes it, he called the White House not at the time of the BLM protests but in April 2020, when protests against coronavirus restrictions — egged on by Trump — were targeting a number of Midwestern governors.

A protest targeting Walz was planned for April 17. Fox News provided predictably supportive coverage to the effort that morning.

“In Minnesota,” reporter Mike Tobin reported, “the demonstrators didn’t even wait for their own planned protest. An organization had planned the protest for today at noon but they got in front of the governor’s residence in St. Paul yesterday. They referenced things like President Trump’s statement that ‘the cure cannot be worse than the disease.’”

Tobin noted that the name of the group running the protest was “Liberate Minnesota.” Two minutes after the segment aired, Trump — a notoriously avid viewer of that channel — posted a message on Twitter: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA.”

Speaking to the Politico reporters, Walz identified this message as one that “brought armed people to my house.” He called the White House to try to understand what “liberate Minnesota” was asking of him, but he didn’t get a response.

“Just to be very candid, the rhetoric that the president engaged in, and then was amplified by others, changed the whole dynamic, especially in a state like Minnesota where I could be out by myself without folks around and it would be fine,” Walz said in 2021. “That was a little different at that point in time.”

It is fair to be a bit more confident in Walz’s recollection of events closer to when they occurred and at a point when he wasn’t running for higher office than it is to rely upon Trump’s presentation on Fox News seven weeks before the presidential election. It’s worth noting, though, that there was another time that pro-Trump protesters gathered at the Minnesota governor’s mansion: on Jan. 6, 2021.

That day, of course, Trump was in Washington. 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, just as he encouraged the protest in Minnesota. But when those protesters surrounded the Capitol, breaking windows to gain entry and disrupting the counting of electoral votes, Trump sat on his hands. Various people around him encouraged him or his staff to weigh in, to offer the sort of message that he claims rapidly dissipated the crowd in Minnesota. But for hours he simply watched events unfold on TV. He released a video calling for protesters to disband — and praising them — at 4:17 p.m., 126 minutes after the first window was broken.

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. 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 Trump’s anecdote isn’t true, which seems likely, the first part holds. He almost certainly saw a news report crediting his rhetoric with bringing protests to the doorstep of the Minnesota governor and then further stoked that anger. Walz says he called the White House seeking clarity on what he was supposed to be doing — and Trump never responded. The tension wasn’t defused on the president’s end.

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,” 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.

Yet when it comes to the Capitol riot, he insists that he was powerless against forces out of his control.