Donald Trump whitewashed history earlier this month, willfully misrepresenting the January 6th mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, killing five in the process. “It was zero threat right from the start…they were hugging and kissing the police and the guards,” the former President told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last Thursday.
Ingraham, who’s long acquiesced to Trump’s fanciful and dangerous conspiracy theories, allowed the former president to make a number of fact-challenged assertions. Trump did concede that some of the January 6th rioters should be prosecuted, but he also retreated to the type of racially charged criticism of Black Lives Matter that has characterized his increasingly unhinged rhetoric. There’s apparently no issue that Trump can’t manipulate to blame on BLM or Antifa, video evidence be damned.
Ingraham’s rise in conservative media is so directly tied to her extreme deference to Trump that she once defended his suggestion that injecting disinfectant into Covid-19 patients could save their lives.
But one woman, unencumbered by rating imperatives or a right-wing audience with a seemingly endless appetite for straw man deflections, sharply rebuked Trump’s comments (watch above).
Terry Fanone – the mother of a DC police officer who was tasered multiple times with a stun-gun, beaten with a flagpole and heard people screaming, “Kill him with his own gun,” on January 6th – told CNN’s Don Lemon that she was outraged by Trump’s characterization of the insurrectionists. These were a group of people, after all, that triggered her son Michael’s heart attack and left him with a traumatic brain injury and a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
“For us, for our family, and for each and every police officer that I know that Michael’s in touch with constantly, it’s outrageous. It’s so dehumanizing. It’s so devaluing,” she said.
While Trump reportedly spends his time at his Mar-a-Lago resort, plotting a vengeful political comeback, Fanone says her family – including Michael’s four daughters – still deals with the fallout from the violent insurrection inspired by the former president’s self-serving and thoroughly debunked claims of election fraud.
CNN reports that one of the men responsible for Fanone’s injuries, Thomas Sibick, faces federal charges. According to CNN:
During the brawl outside the Capitol, Sibick allegedly grabbed Fanone’s badge and radio, and he later posted a photo of himself holding a police shield on Facebook, court filings say.
When initially contacted by the FBI, Sibick said he was merely trying to help pull Fanone away from the crowd. But an FBI agent told Sibick that video footage suggested otherwise, and the Buffalo, NY resident became more cooperative. He admitted to burying Fanone’s badge in his backyard.
Terry Fanone said Sibick’s arrest “doesn’t begin to repair the damage that has been done to not only Michael, but all these other people who really were — they were the ones that were persecuted.”