Then-President Donald Trump knew there would be violence on January 6, 2021, but still used threatening “mob-type” rhetoric against his vice president to galvanize his supporters, according to British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder.
“It was so obvious” that there was going to be violence, Holder said on Yahoo’s “Skullduggery” podcast earlier this week. It was Trump’s “last hurrah,” he added. “He apparently had this ridiculous idea that interfering with this ceremonial process of certifying these results could somehow prevent the inauguration of President Biden.”
Holder, who interviewed Trump and his family before and after the election for his documentary Unprecedented, was “absolutely” convinced there would be violence that day and said it would be “unreasonable” to believe Trump was thinking otherwise way.
Yet Trump, using what Holder called “wink, wink mob rhetoric,” at the same time told supporters he “wouldn’t be very happy” with Vice President Mike Pence if he didn’t reject the election results at the Jan. 6 session of Congress to certify the Electoral College count.
Trump took no action to prevent the violence. Nor did he tell his supporters on the day of the riot to leave the Capitol hours after the violence erupted. He also told the rebels, “We love you.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified Tuesday before a special House committee investigating the riot that Trump also knew people at his Ellipse rally that day had guns. Still, he wanted to be allowed to march to the U.S. Capitol with the rest of the crowd without having to go through checkpoints, saying they weren’t “here to hurt me,” according to Hutchinson’s testimony .
Hutchinson also testified that she was told that Trump exploded and grabbed the steering wheel of the SUV he was traveling in when the Secret Service refused to take him to the Capitol that day to join the rebels.
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Trump’s state of mind, his expectation of violence, combined with his calls for supporters to “fight like hell” before the Capitol attack and his plan to participate in it are likely to play a role in the Justice Department’s decisions on whether to charge the former president in riot-related crimes, according to the Associated Press.
On the Yahoo podcast, he called Trump “deluded” and “incredibly dangerous.” He described the former president as “in a cloud cuckoo” over his baseless allegations of rigged elections.
He is “not a rational player. I mean, he’s just not,” Holder said in his assessment of Trump, based on a number of interviews with him. “You can’t have a conversation with him the same way you can have a conversation with most other people. He is someone who lives in a different reality.
He added: “You can’t debate this guy. There is no way anyone can convince Donald Trump that he is wrong… He will never admit that he did anything wrong. He will always double down, he is always right and it is always someone else’s fault.
Holder was granted extraordinary access to Trump and his children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. both before and after the 2020 election for his documentary. He compared the family to the grandiose, conniving family from the HBO TV series Inheritance.
They were comfortable talking to him because everyone believed Trump would win re-election, Holder said.
They were “very, very confident that they were going to win the election,” Holder said. Their “arrogance was just absolutely remarkable.”
The full podcast can be heard below:
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
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