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Trump compares Jan. 6 crowd to MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

by Brett Samuels - 08/08/24 3:15 PM ET

Former President Trump bragged Thursday that the crowd he addressed on Jan. 6, 2021, was the largest he’s ever spoken to and argued those who were arrested after storming the Capitol were being treated “very unfairly.”

Trump was asked at a news conference whether he thought there would be a peaceful transfer of power after November’s election. He insisted there was a peaceful transfer when he lost in 2020, though he challenged the results legally all the way up to the Supreme Court and has continued to falsely claim the election was fraudulent and rigged.

Pressed on whether he thought there was a peaceful transfer of power in January 2021, Trump launched into a defense of his Jan. 6 rally outside the White House, which preceded the violence at the Capitol.

“I think the people that — if you look at Jan. 6, which a lot of people aren’t talking about very much, those people were treated very harshly when you compare them to other things that took place in this country where a lot of people were killed,” Trump said at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “Nobody was killed on Jan. 6. But I think the people of Jan. 6 were treated very unfairly.

“The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken before was that day,” he continued. “And I’ll tell you, it’s very hard to find a picture of that crowd. … If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours. Same real estate. Same everything. Same number of people, if not, we had more.”

“We actually had more people. They said I had 25,000, and he had 1 million people. And I’m OK with it, because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King,” Trump concluded.

2024 Election Coverage

Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden, insisting in the weeks after the vote that it was rigged, fraudulent and stolen. His claims culminated in violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters clashed with law enforcement and stormed the complex to try to stop the certification of Biden’s victory.

Hundreds of people have been charged over their actions on Jan. 6, and Trump himself has been criminally charged in Washington, D.C., and in Georgia for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.

The former president has repeatedly downplayed the violence on Jan. 6, referring to those who stormed the Capitol as “patriots” and “warriors.” He has suggested he would be willing to pardon at least some of those charged for their actions that day, should he win reelection.