While he has not yet said he will be running in 2024, former President Trump has said that if he runs and wins, he will consider pardons for those charged in the January 6 breach of the Capitol. And — as if on cue — he drew fire, even from his own party. Both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were quick to publicly disagree with Trump.
President Trump’s remarks were made Saturday night at a Save America rally in Conroe, Texas. The former president used his time to take shots at several Democrats and said of the people arrested and charged in the January 6 Capitol breach, “Another thing we’ll do, and so many people have been asking me about it, if I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” adding, “We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Trump went on to say, “This hasn’t happened to all of the other atrocities that took place recently,” adding, “Nothing like this has happened. What that ‘unselect committee’ is doing and what the people are doing who are running those prisons is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. We will treat them fairly.”
Despite Trump’s correct statement that the people accused (wrongly) of insurrection have been “treated so unfairly,” members of his own party were quick to take to the spotlight to disagree. Both McConnell and Graham have taken opportunities to tell media that Trump is wrong, with Graham going so far as to say Trump’s remarks were “inappropriate.”
As Fox News reported:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell broke with former President Trump on Tuesday, saying that he does not believe individuals who pleaded guilty to crimes related to last year’s violent Capitol Hill protest should have their sentences shortened.
“One hundred and sixty-five people have pleaded guilty to criminal behavior,” the Kentucky Republican said when asked about Trump’s recent suggestion that he would issue pardons for the Capitol Hill rioters if he were re-elected as president. “None of the trials have been finished yet, but 165 have pleaded guilty to criminal behavior. My view is, I would not be in favor of shortening any of the sentences for any of the people who pleaded guilty to crimes.”
McConnell went on to regurgitate the false narrative — created by Democrats and their accomplices in mainstream liberal media — that January 6 was an insurrection wherein Trump supporters who would not accept the results of a fair election attempted to overthrow the process and keep Trump in office. As Fox News reported:
McConnell added that the election of 2020 was “decided on December 14 of 2020 when the Electoral College certified the winner of the election” and that the protesters were attempting to stop a peaceful transition of power, which had “never happened before in our country.”
While the actions of the protesters who breached the Capitol Building on January 6 were certainly wrong and stupid, those protesters were not “insurrectionists” attempting to overthrow the election. That McConnell pretends otherwise appears to be an exercise in politics. But in that, McConnell is not alone. Graham took to the media over the weekend to claim that Trump was wrong to even consider pardons for those accused of serious crimes on January 6. Graham told CBS News’ Face the Nation Sunday that Trump’s remarks were “inappropriate.” In the segment, CBS’ Margaret Brennan said, “Senator, more than 730 people have been charged by the Justice Department for their role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th to stop the certification of our election.” Graham agreed with Brennan’s assertion and then Brennan played Trump’s remarks for Graham and asked, “Pardons? Do you agree?”
Graham answered, “No, I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol. There are other groups with causes that may want to go down the violent path if these people get pardoned.” Brennan asked if Trump’s remarks were “a dangerous thing to say” and Graham answered:
Yeah. Well, I think it’s inappropriate. I don’t want to reinforce that defiling the Capitol was OK. I don’t want to do anything that would make this more likely in the future. And just let me finish my thought here. 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. So I don’t want to do anything from raising bail to pardoning people who take the law into their own hands because it will make more violence more likely. I want to deter people who did that on January the 6th. And those who did it, I hope they go to jail and get the book thrown at them because they deserve it.
For his part, Trump shrugged off Graham’s condemnation as the erroneous ramblings of “a RINO.” In a Newsmax interview aired Tuesday, Trump was asked by host Robb Schmitt about Graham’s statement. Trump answered, “Well, Lindsey Graham is wrong. I mean, Lindsey is a nice guy, but he’s a RINO.” Trump went on to say about Antifa and BLM — true rioters who did actually attempt to sway American public policy by violent means — “Lindsey’s wrong. Look, they tried to burn down Washington — we’re talking federal buildings. They were terrible. Every Democrat city was on fire, and nobody says anything about it. Antifa and BLM were causing so many problems, including death.”
Graham — who has always been known as a great ally of the Democrats — truly outdid himself this time. Though he has often been called a RINO — a pejorative meaning “Republican in Name Only” — he has never deserved the moniker more than this time.
Not only did Graham say that Trump’s remarks were “inappropriate,” but he then went on to draw a literal one-to-one comparison between the Summer of Terror when Antifa and BLM burned and pillaged their way across 200 American cities and the comparatively mild protest-that-got-out-of-hand on the Capitol grounds on January 6.
Granted, what happened on January 6 was wrong — as this writer and this magazine have repeatedly said — but there is simply no comparison between that and the Summer of Terror.
This is a point that did not escape President Trump, who argued that unlike the Summer of Terror, only “one young fine woman” died during the Capitol breach. Trump was referring to Ashli Babbit, who — liberal mainstream media lies to the contrary duly noted and dismissed — is the only person who died at the Capitol that day. In fact, she is the only person who died as a result of the “insurrection.”
With Republicans such as Graham and McConnell lending credibility to the false narrative that January 6 was an insurrection, Democrats get a major boost from what is supposed to be the opposition. So, while President Trump called Graham a RINO, the label would perfectly fit McConnell, as well — at least in this instance.
Given the behavior of Graham and McConnell, one could be forgiven for asking, with Republicans like them, who needs Democrats? Because while the lunatics are running the asylum in the Democrat party (and in particular, in the Biden administration), RINOs seem to be in position of power with the GOP.
