In the Debate, Trump Referred to the U.S. Government As ‘The Other Side’
I guess we knew it was coming
At the ABC presidential candidates’ debate last night, moderator David Muir asked Donald Trump:
Mr. President, on January 6, [2021,] you told your supporters to march to the Capitol. You said you would be right there with them. The country and the world saw what played out at the Capitol that day. The officers coming under attack…Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?
Trump replied with over 400 words but didn’t say whether he wishes he’d behaved differently, despite Muir’s attempts to redirect him.
Instead, Trump asserted that, during the Capitol attack, “nobody on the other side was killed.”
The remark immediately hit me. Just who was “the other side” on January 6?
Trump may have expected his audience to hear “the other side” as “Democrats,” but that interpretation doesn’t hold up. Democratic voters didn’t die on January 6 because they weren’t gathered outside the Capitol that day: not to hear Trump speak, not to chant that the vice president should be hanged, not to break into the Capitol, not to pressure Congress to overturn the election results. Radicalized MAGA supporters did all that.
