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A year after a mob inspired by his false claims of voter fraud stormed the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump made no mention of the 2020 election in an hour-long Wednesday night interview with conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck.
Beck's broadcast—which was pre-recorded in December 2021—referred to the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol as a "distraction." Instead of discussing the 2020 election or the riots, the interview focused on Trump's complaints about the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.
The omission of the two topics is notable seeing as, over the last year, Trump has repeatedly doubled down on claims that now-President Biden stole the election with mass voting irregularities in key states. Scores of lawsuits were thrown out by the courts and official recounts, audits and investigations have all turned up no proof that any irregularities ever occurred.
Beck's media company, The Blaze, said Trump didn't mention voter fraud and the 2020 race during the interview. In the Thursday broadcast of The Glenn Beck Program, Beck said he didn't ask Trump about those topics because Beck "really wanted to focus on the future."
Trump had been planning an event to mark the riot's one-year anniversary. The former president blamed the event's cancellation on the congressional committee investigating the attack, two Republicans and the media.
However, conservative politicians and media figures discouraged Trump from holding the event. Trump abruptly canceled the event, reportedly on the advice of Senator Lindsey Graham and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, a close ally who took the unusual step of criticizing the former president's plan on air this week.
Rather, Trump's allies preferred that the former president put the events of January 6 behind them and switch public attention to Biden's many problems: from inflation and the border crisis to a runaway pandemic he had promised to end.
In his interview with Beck, Trump focused largely on those issues.
"[The vaccine mandates] scared everybody and they hurt the economy very badly," Trump told Beck. "You know, the mandates are one of the reasons you can't get anybody to work for you. The mandates have been a disaster. But I would like [people] to take the vaccine, but they have to do it if they want."
Trump also did not mention the 2020 election in other statements released on Tuesday, including one where he told his base to "rise up" against vaccine mandates.
"Inflation is a big word and stagflation is even worse, if you think of it," Trump said. "A lot of that's caused, in my opinion, by energy. They shut our energy off... When I left it was $1.87 a gallon for gasoline. Out in California, I was just in, it's $7.77."
Newsweek's examination of Trump's claim about gas prices found his claim to be mostly false.
Elsewhere in his interview, Trump claimed that the U.S. was "energy independent" from reliance on other countries' fuel sources. The fact-checking site PolitiFact called the claim "half-true."
"Millions of people allowed to come into our country," Trump said when speaking about immigration. "They had 121 countries now, prisons where people are being dumped in our country... and many of those people that are causing the crime of coming through our southern border. We had the strongest border in history. Now we have the weakest border in history."
It's unclear where Trump's information about the alleged prisoners came from. When Trump previously claimed that Mexico was deliberately sending criminals to immigrate into the U.S., PolitiFact ranked the claim as "pants on fire" untrue.
The fact-checking site also found that Trump's claim about the border was "half-true", noting that the lowest number of immigrants apprehended at the southern border during Trump's presidency was likely due to COVID-19 shutdowns internationally. Previous presidential administrations had reported lower numbers of immigrant apprehensions than Trump, the fact-checkers added.
Trump also mentioned Biden's threat to issue sanctions against Russia if Russian President Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine.
"Putin's saying, 'Sanctions? If they're only going to sanction, then there's no sanction that's going to stop me from taking over a country,'" Trump told Beck. "And by the way, (Ukraine is) a massive piece of land in an unbelievable location, right? You know that? But (Biden) didn't say it could have very serious consequences. A sanction is not a serious consequence, no matter how strong it is, not when it comes to taking over a country."
Trump then blamed Biden for botching the U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan.
"When we are surrendered in Afghanistan—it was like a surrender—to take the military out first and to leave American hostages. It's probably 1000s of them. To take hundreds of thousands of people out of Afghanistan. We had no idea who they were. There are many terrorists in that group. Only 3 percent of them, it now turns out, we're qualified to leave."
In September 2021, Biden's Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said that "approximately 3 percent" of the 60,000 Afghan evacuees brought to the U.S. had special immigrant visas for prioritized evacuees. The visas were granted who Afghans who worked for the American military and were most likely to be murdered as traitors once the Taliban re-rose to power.
Mayorkas added that "some" evacuees were flagged on terror watchlists while in transit to the United States. These people weren't allowed to enter the United States.
Trump's line about hostages echoes other conservative commentators who claim that any Americans left in Afghanistan are effectively hostages under the Taliban regime. Fewer than 200 U.S. citizens looking to flee Afghanistan were left in the country after the military withdrawal, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an August 31, 2021 speech.
On the one-year anniversary of the riots, Democratic President Joe Biden will make a speech noting Trump's role in inciting the 2021 insurrection. The White House called the riot "the tragic culmination of what those four years under President Trump did to our country."
While Democrats will attend planned memorial events surrounding the anniversary of the January 6 attack at the Capitol, no Republican House or Senate members are expected to attend.
On January 6, 2021, Trump's supporters began an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn the 2020 election's results. Many arrested riot suspects have said that they believed Trump's baseless claim Biden "stole" the election from him through an unprecedented nationwide conspiracy of voter fraud.
Trump's former attorney general, his former head of U.S. cybersecurity infrastructure, over 60 court cases filed by Republicans, as well as numerous statewide audits have not uncovered any evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.
Five people died in connection with the riots and roughly 140 USCP officers were injured. The police injuries include a broken spine, a lost eye, lost fingers, brain damage and multiple cases of PTSD. Four Capitol Police officers have died by suicide since the insurrection.
While ransacking the Capitol, the rioters shattered windows while trying to access congressional chambers, smeared feces in the hallway and stole computer equipment, potentially constituting a national security breach.
As of January 5, 2022, legal authorities have arrested and charged more than 725 defendants in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia for their roles in the January 6 attack, according to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Update 01/07/22, 1:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include a statement from Beck's media company, The Blaze.
Correction 01/07/22, 1:30 a.m. ET: A previous version of this article said the interview was pre-recorded in November 2021. It was pre-recorded in December 2021.
