Trump: I Regret Not Marching to the Capitol

Donald Trump tells the Washington Post he wanted to march to the Capitol with his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, but Secret Service wouldn't allow it. "I would have gone there in a minute," he says in the interview. Trump criticized the violence that ensued and, as he has done previously, laid most of the blame on Nancy Pelosi.

• Blaming Pelosi: "I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn't she doing something about it? Why isn't Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of DC also. The mayor of DC and Nancy Pelosi are in charge," Trump tells the Post's Josh Dawsey. "I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, 'It's got to be taken care of,' and I assumed they were taking care of it." (Trump has been pushing this theme for more than a year now, notes Rolling Stone.)
• Pelosi's response: "The former president's desperate lies aside, the speaker was no more in charge of the security of the US Capitol that day than Mitch McConnell," says a spokesman. Dawsey further explains: "Pelosi does not have total control over the Capitol Police, as Trump alleged, but shares control of the Capitol with the Senate majority leader. Most decisions on securing the Capitol are made by a police board."

• The rest: The interview covers a wide range. Among other things, Trump boasts of the crowd size for his Jan. 6 speech; predicts other big GOP candidates won't run should he enter the 2024 race; and says that while he spoke to Ginni Thomas (a "fine woman" who "loves our country") during his presidency, he was unaware of her advocacy of overturning the election results. Read it here.
• Biggest surprise? Aside from the nugget that Trump wanted to march to the Capitol, there's not much new in the interview, writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. In fact, the biggest surprise might be that he granted an interview to the Post at all. Morrissey wonders if it's because Trump will have to begrudgingly start engaging with the mainstream press again if he opts to run in 2024. He "needs to start thinking about kicking the campaign back into high gear at the end of the year, and those pumps will need some priming."

(More President Trump stories.)