Senators have to get tougher, or you won’t have a Republican Party anymore. We won the Presidential Election, by a lot. FIGHT FOR IT. Don’t let them take it away!”[1]
B. President Trump Encourages His Followers to Come to Washington on January 6, 2021 and “Fight” to Overturn the Election Results
Following the Electoral College vote, President Trump fixated on January 6, 2021—the date of the Joint Session of Congress—as presenting his last, best hope to reverse the election results and remain in power. Even as he continued improperly pressuring state officials, DOJ, and Members of Congress to overturn the electoral outcome, he sharply escalated his public statements, using more incendiary and violent language to urge supporters to “stop the steal” on January 6. He insisted that the election had been “rigged” and “stolen,” and that his followers had to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” against this “act of war,” since they “can’t let it happen” and “won’t take it anymore!” These statements turned his “wild” rally on January 6 into a powder keg waiting to blow. Indeed, it was obvious and entirely foreseeable that the furious crowd assembled before President Trump at the “Save America Rally” on January 6 was primed (and prepared) for violence if he lit a spark.
By mid-December 2020, President Trump had spent months insisting to his base that the only way he could lose the election was a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself. After the Electoral College vote, he channeled that fury toward January 6, which he presented as the final firewall against a historic fraud that “stole” their democracy. On December 19, he tweeted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”[2] On December 26, he tweeted: “If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen, with proof of such acts at a level never seen
