Jake Tapper Decries Trump’s Capitol Mob Reaction on Jimmy Kimmel: ‘The President Sides with the Terrorists and Not the Terrorized’
CNN’s Jake Tapper was set to be a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live last Wednesday, but when President Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as members of the House and Senate were certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, he had to reschedule.
Tapper finally joined Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night and had a lot to say about the assault on the Capitol and the president’s reaction to “MAGA terrorists.
The CNN anchor first revealed that things in D.C. are “pretty horrible” following the president’s decision to “incite a terrorist attack in the U.S. Capitol that resulted in five deaths.”
Praising his fellow CNN hosts, Tapper noted that they’ve been practicing journalism amid an administration that often fights facts and attempts to silence the media.
“We had a president who was working so hard to make truth and facts and decency into partisan issues, and we saw last week perhaps the inevitable result of that,” Tapper said, revealing that his friends at other news organizations have been “restrained” as a result of Trump’s strained relationship with reporters.
Admitting that he expected things to “get ugly” on Wednesday, considering Trump was holding a rally at the same time as the Electoral College vote count, Tapper pegged the attack as the “natural culmination of the Trump presidency.”
“I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect, it does feel like this is what we were all worried about, we just couldn’t put it into words,” said the CNN anchor, referring to Trump’s tendency to “play footsie” with far-right groups.
“There has to be some sort of reckoning, some sort of consequence,” Tapper added. “Not just for President Trump but for everybody who was part of this. I mean, two-thirds of the House Republicans voted to commit sedition, to overturn the election, after the terrorist attack! When there was blood on the ground!”
Tapper then delivered a blunt criticism of the president and the GOP, connecting Trump’s election fraud lies to the deaths of his own supporters at the Capitol attack last week.
Noting that all of those who died on Wednesday were Trump supporters, Tapper questioned why the president has not done more to honor them.
“He doesn’t care about people whose names aren’t Donald Trump,” Kimmel pointed out.
“What did Donald Trump say that day? He said to the terrorists, nothing about Brian Sicknick, he still hasn’t, but he said to the terrorists, after the attack, we love you, you’re very special,” Tapper exclaimed. “It’s not fun to say to the American people, the president sides with the president and not the terrorized.”
Watch above, via YouTube.
