As Donald Trump watched rioters storm the Capitol on television on January 6, 2021, one of the president’s top aides drafted Trump’s first tweet that urged protesters to remain peaceful, ABC News reported.
Last year, a congressional panel investigating Trump’s role in the January 6 events outlined how the former president was reluctant to call in additional law enforcement to stop rioters during the first few hours of the Capitol breach and instead spent much of his time watching television or making calls to his attorney and Republican allies.
New details of what went on inside the White House during that time show Trump needed the hand of Dan Scavino, who was his deputy chief of staff and is now senior advisor to Trump’s reelection campaign, to try to calm protesters.
The point here is that Trump cannot claim, in this instance, that he wanted the insurrectionists to “stay peaceful” - because Scavino wrote and posted that on Trump’s Twitter account, and it took a half hour of pleading to get Trump to “allow” it to be posted. And you know that that was not the first text suggested; they wanted to tell everyone to disperse, and Trump prevented that.