Richard Grenell: Worst Thing About Jan. 6 Was When Trump Got Kicked Off Twitter

A onetime aide of former President Donald Trump has a hot take about Jan. 6 that defies all logic.

Richard Grenell, who served in the Trump administration as acting director of national intelligence, appeared on Newsmax Thursday to suggest the worst thing that happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

No, it wasn’t the riot on Capitol Hill or the attempt to violently overturn a presidential election.

Rather, Grenell claims the real victim was Trump’s Twitter account, which the former president was banned from using two days after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

“January 6th was a terrible day because it’s the day Big Tech and the media kicked President Trump off Twitter and silenced his voice,” Grenell said. “That was the day that was an attack on our democracy.” (Again, for the record, Twitter actually banned Trump’s account on Jan. 8.)

Grenell also claimed that the real enemies of democracy are people who oppose voter ID laws ― which Republican officials have primarily used to try and suppress Democratic voters, and which purport to address a “voter fraud” problem that in reality is vanishingly small.

Grenell is only one of many conservatives who have tried to minimize and misrepresent the events of Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters violently forced their way into the Capitol, breaking windows and scaling walls, in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won. Some of the rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” referring to Trump’s vice president.

Lawmakers were hurriedly evacuated, and rioters broke into the Senate chamber and some offices. Several people died in connection with the violence, more than 100 people were injured, and federal prosecutors have said the day’s events resulted in $1.5 million worth of damages.

Yet some Republicans have tried to wave away the gravity of the attack, with Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) likening it to “a normal tourist visit,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) calling it “by and large... a peaceful protest” and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) announcing plans to lead a sort of walking tour retracing the steps of what he called “patriotic Americans... who had no intent of breaking the law or doing violence.”

On Thursday, Twitter users had strong opinions on Grenell’s (likely trollish) comments, with some pointing out that he’d gotten the date of the ban wrong.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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