Former United States Donald Trump denied having any knowledge about his supporters starting a riot at the US Capitol Hill on January 6, according to a new book. Trump told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he was not watching the television at that time and as a result, he came to know about the riots and other disturbances much later from members of his staff.
“I didn’t usually have the television on. I’d have it on if there was something. I then later turned it on, and I saw what was happening,” Haberman quoted Trump in the book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”, according to The Guardian.
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“I had heard that afterward and actually on the late side. I was having meetings. I was also with [then-chief of staff] Mark Meadows and others. I was not watching television.”
The claims made by Trump in his interview with the author are a direct contradiction with his accounts in front of the congressional committee. The former president earlier claimed that he was watching the events unfold on television as the mob attacked the US Capitol Hill in 2021.
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Haberman also claimed in her book that Trump was shaken by the events that unfolded at US Capitol Hill and was aware of the fact that they tarnished his tenure at the White House.
“After the headiness of being at the center of the world’s gaze, his time after the White House made him seem shrunken. He often played golf and then went to his newly built office at the club for meetings with whoever travelled down to seek his approval,” the book claimed.
“He would watch television before going to dinner, where club members would sometimes applaud him, and then it would start all over again the next day, so removed from the daily rhythms of the broader world that he was oblivious to holidays on the calendar and staff had to remind him.”
