Former President Trump displayed the improbable second term that would work as a tool of personal vengeance, and become even more aggressive than his first term in office. He promised to pardon US Capitol insurrectionists if he wins.
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His promise at the Texas rally was followed by a call for demonstrations if prosecutors in New York, who are looking into Trump's business practices to do anything that he defined as wrong or illegal.
During an appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation," the South Carolina Republican and Trump ally diverged from the former president regarding his Saturday comments after moderator Margaret Brennan played a segment from the Saturday event in Conroe.
"If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly," Trump told supporters at the "Save America" rally. "And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly."
The comments show Trump's dark side and his obsession with ridiculous lies that he won the 2020 election. As was usual during his freak presidential term, Trump makes no distinction between personal goals and the interest of America or the standard rule of law. It's all about Trump, the over study of Benito Mussolini. Maybe Trump will end in the same way.
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But the former President's new rhetorical outburst also at times hinted at concern with his own legal position, and comes at a moment when various criminal and congressional lines of investigation seem to be tightening around him. The House select committee probing the January 6, 2021 riot has now penetrated deep inside Trump's West Wing inner circle, and he lost a Supreme Court bid to keep key documents secret. The likelihood of a damning accounting from the committee, bristling with new details about Trump's attempt to destroy American democracy, is growing, though the GOP has sought to thwart it at every turn.
Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday said that former President Donald Trump hinting at potential pardons for January 6 rioters during a weekend rally in Texas was "inappropriate."
Graham expressed disagreement with the former president's statements when asked by Brennan.
"He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot," Graham told Alisyn Camerota. "He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represents the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. He's the ISIL man of the year."
Graham said Trump's rhetoric benefits ISIS in helping them recruit people to their cause. He said having traveled to the Middle East 36 times as a lawmaker and in the Air Force reserve, he knows the troops and diplomats on the front lines are very concerned.
As well as further threatening US democracy on Saturday night, Trump was preoccupied with his personal legal exposure. He fired off a wild attack, which looked to be racially-motivated, on two Black New York prosecutors investigating whether his business empire deliberately falsified accounts to get preferential treatment on loans and income taxes. He also alluded to potential legal peril he's facing in Fulton County, Georgia, where a Black district attorney has been granted a special grand jury to examine his attempt to steal President Joe Biden's win in the state.
In a sign of the potential impact of Trump's incitement, District Attorney Fani Willis wrote to the FBI on Sunday asking for an immediate risk assessment for the Fulton County Courthouse and government buildings. She said that "security concerns were escalated this weekend" by the former President's speech and added that her office had already received "communications" from people unhappy with the investigation before Trump's rally.
Trump's pressure on investigators prompted Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who sits on the House committee probing the insurrection, to warn that the ex-President had issued a "call to arms."
"Calling out for demonstrations if, you know, anything adverse, legally, happens to him, is pretty extraordinary. And I think it's important to think through what message is being sent," the California Democrat told CNN's Pamela Brown on Sunday.
In yet another sign of Trump's incessantly consuming inability to accept his election loss, he issued a statement that same evening slamming former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing his demands to overturn the result of the democratic election in 2020, and falsely claimed that the then-vice president had the power to do so.
More than a year after the January 6 insurrection — where rioters breached the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of now-President Joe Biden's electoral victory over Trump — 178 individuals have pled guilty to a range of crimes in connection to the riot and more than 750 people have been charged with crimes.
The bipartisan House select committee investigating January 6 is currently probing the attack, much to the dissatisfaction of Trump and many Republicans in Congress.
The former president has not yet announced if he will launch a 2024 White House bid but has held campaign-style rallies across the country since leaving the Oval Office last year.
Graham went on to make an unsubstantiated connection between then-Sen. Kamala Harris's support of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a nonprofit organization that assists low-income individuals who need money for bail, and the rioting that occurred in the state after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
After Harris asked her Twitter followers "to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota," the former president and Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas attempted to conflate peaceful demonstrators fighting for racial justice with those who were actively rioting.
According to The Washington Post, few of the protesters actually needed assistance from the Minnesota Freedom Fund, and roughly 92 percent of the people charged during the protests weren't required to post bail.
However, on Sunday, Graham brought up Harris during the interview with Brennan.
"When Kamala Harris and her associates and the people that work for her, her staffers, raised money to bail out the rioters who hit cops in the head and burned down stores, I didn't like that either," he said. However, we should note that this was in Minnesota, not the US Capitol.
He added: "I don't want to do anything from raising bail to pardoning people who take the law in their own hands because it will make more violence more likely. I want to deter people who did what — on January 6. And those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it."
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