Donald Trump will bend history to his will as soon as he comes to power, former MP David Jolly (Fla.) predicted this weekend.
“I think one of the things that Donald Trump wants to do this term, from day one, is rewrite history,” said Jolly, who served as a Republican in Congress but later renounced his ties to the GOP, told MSNBC’s Alex Witt. “We’ll see on COVID, with RFK Jr. there. We’ll see it in Russia, with Tulsi Gabbard there. We will see it in many prosecutions if Kash Patel is there, should these people be confirmed.”
Jolly was referring to Trump’s picks for secretary of health, director of national intelligence and FBI director, respectively. Critics have sounded the alarm about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s skepticism about vaccines, Gabbard’s sympathetic views on Russia and Patel’s penchant for dangerous conspiracy theories and his fixation on it Trump’s supposed enemies.
“I think we’re going to see a retelling of January 6 as well,” Jolly continued. “And the question is: does that start with his inauguration speech? Or is it something that happens through grace? Or is it a prosecution – an attempted prosecution – of Liz Cheney?”
“I really think Donald Trump wants to rewrite history,” he concluded. “And to do that, he is going to foist a narrative on the American people that is largely untrue, but one that he hopes, with the influence of the conservative media, he can win.”
Trump has vowed to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Trump’s favor.
Although the majority of those serving significant prison sentences have committed violent crimes, including attacking law enforcement officers, the president-elect has called them “January 6 peaceful protesters” and “hostages” who were unfairly prosecuted.
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He has also made threatening comments about former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), warning that she “could get into a lot of trouble” because she was a member of the House panel that investigated the attack. He says he thinks members of the panel “should go to jail.”
Trump has a penchant for revisionist history, with a pattern of backtracking on promises, avert guilt for his failures and questionably taking credit for successes. He promised during his 2024 campaign to lower the prices of “everything” but has admitted since his victory that it is “hard to bring things down once they have gone up.”