Trump confuses Haley and Pelosi, accusing rival of Jan. 6 lapse
GREG ALLEN/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., left, arrives at the Kennedy Center Honors, on Dec. 3, at The Kennedy Center in Washington. Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley arrives to speak at a campaign event at Franklin Pierce University, today, in Rindge, N.H.
CONCORD, N.H. >> Former President Donald Trump on Friday appeared to confuse Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and connecting her to the House committee that investigated it.
Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot.
On Friday night, Trump was in the middle of mocking Haley for the size of the crowds at her events, and criticizing the news media, when he pivoted to how he gave a speech in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol attack.
“You know, when she comes here she gets like nine people, and the press never reports the crowds,” Trump said of Haley, whose crowds have lately been, at the very least, in double digits.
Then, he changed subjects. “You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6,” he said. “You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley.”
Trump then repeated his frequent claim that the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — including Trump’s actions that day — “destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence.”
Then, he claimed that Haley was in charge of security that day, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.
“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” he said. (She was not.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”
Trump, 77, often attacks President Joe Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Biden is mentally unfit for office. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Trump said Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.”
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has frequently tried to lay blame for the Jan. 6 riot with Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats. There is no evidence, however, that Trump ever offered to have troops deployed to the Capitol, or that Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, rejected them.
At 3:52 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Haley reposted photos of besieged officials inside the Capitol, writing on Twitter, “An embarrassment in the eyes of the world and total sadness for our country. Wake up America.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
