Donald Trump Jr has hit out at Sen Mitch McConnell after the Senate Minority Leader criticised Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s presentation of the Capitol riot on his television programme this week.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Carlson the exclusive opportunity to report on more than 40,000 hours of previously unreleased footage from the Capitol from January 6, 2021, which Carlson turned into a report that rankled members of both parties.
Among the critics was Mr McConnell, who voiced his displeasure with the presentation at the Capitol earlier this week.
“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement officer here at the Capitol thinks,” Mr McConnell said.
Indeed, the Capitol police chief issued a statement criticising Carlson — who he said “cherrypicked to present offensive and misleading conclusions” in his report. Mr Trump, who has been critical of Mr McConnell in the past, went after him again in a video shot from the driver’s seat of a vehicle.
“With Republicans like Mitch McConnell, who needs Democrats?” Mr Trump asked. “He says he’s upset with the way that Fox News and Tucker Carlson depicted what happened because it’s in contrast with what the head of the Capitol police said in a report? Are you kidding me? Are you insane?”
Mr Trump’s decision to align himself with Carlson and a segment of the Republican voting base that disputes the narrative of the Capitol riot as a coordinated insurrection aimed at subverting the result of the 2020 presidential election comes as the GOP has fractured into separate camps on the issue in the buildup to the 2024 presidential primary.
Former President Donald Trump, Mr Trump’s father, is again a candidate for the Republican nomination — allowed to run again only because Republican senators like Mr McConnell voted not to confirm his impeachment following the riot.
More than 1,000 people have been criminally charged for their conduct on January 6, though Carlson, in his report, painted a picture of a largely docile crowd that contained just a handful of bad actors.
“The crowd was enormous,” Carlson said in his televised report. “A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism. We’ve seen their pictures again and again. But the overwhelming majority weren’t. They were peaceful, they were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers.”
