Trump Has a Wild “Compensation” Plan for January 6 Rioters

As Trump continues to cut federal programs used by millions of Americans, he proposed financially compensating the MAGA loyalists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In an interview with Newsmax Tuesday, host Greg Kelly asked Trump if there’s any talk of a “compensation fund” for prosecuted January 6 rioters, because they lost “opportunity” and “income.”

“Well there’s talk about that, we have a lot of people talking about it, a lot of the people that are in government now talk about it, because a lot of people in government really like that group of people,” Trump responded, referring to the rioters as “patriots” who went to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.”

Upon taking office, Trump issued a sweeping pardon for some 1,500 people who tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

“These people are incredible people; they were treated so unfairly, so horribly,” Trump said of the insurrectionists.

The January 6 attack caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol, and more than 140 police officers were injured—a stat line well deserving of payment, according to the president. Only a small portion of court-ordered restitution payments have been made by offenders to offset the costs of repairs, according to ABC News.

Trump specifically mentioned “big MAGA fan” Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force Veteran who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack. He called the officer, who is still employed, a “disgrace.”

The president claimed that no other group in history has been treated as badly as January 6 rioters. “The judges, the system, the hatred, the vitriol, the prosecutors, the way they wanted to destroy these people,” Trump said. Rich, coming from the man who is weaponizing those same mechanisms to unlawfully detain and deport thousands of immigrants.

Americans are rallying behind Democrats—even in deep Trump territory.

In a major upset, Democrat James Malone usurped a seat in Pennsylvania’s state Senate in a special election, flipping a district that had voted for Donald Trump by more than 15 points mere months ago. Malone previously served as the mayor of East Petersburg and will succeed Republican Senator Ryan Aument, who resigned from the office in December to serve as a state director for Senator Dave McCormick.

“I’m very excited and really, really happy that all the work we put in has paid off,” Malone told WGAL-TV.

“Everyday voters are not liking what they’re seeing at the federal level; they don’t like the chaos. We want to be sure that we, as Pennsylvania, are standing up for our neighbors and are standing up for our state,” Malone continued. “And brotherly love is Pennsylvania, and that just proved out. Kindness over criticism, right? So that’s what we’re trying to do, and I think that that really is what we’re looking at, moving forward.”

Malone’s victory followed another Democratic win Tuesday in the Keystone State, after Dan Goughnour won a House seat, maintaining a Democratic stronghold in Pennsylvania’s lower chamber.

The wins were roundly celebrated by the larger Democratic Party, which saw its voters excoriate their inaction on a GOP budget resolution that promised whopping Medicaid cuts at the national level last week.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saluted Malone’s strategy, urging the party to refocus on winning critical local elections, “from school board to councils to state legislatures.”

Republicans, meanwhile, felt the sting.

“Damn,” posted Elon Musk, reacting to a screenshot of the election results.

But Malone had a quick reply.

“I’ll take this as a compliment, because Elon Musk knows I’m about to get to work for the everyday people of Pennsylvania, not him and his billionaire friends,” he wrote Wednesday morning.

The Trump administration has finally settled on one story: Someone else within the administration—and not national security adviser Mike Waltz—is to blame for the massive internal fuckup that resulted in Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, being added to a Signal group chat in which top defense officials were planning a strike on the Houthis in Yemen.

“So your staffer did not put his contact information.… How did it end up in your phone?” asked Fox’s Laura Ingraham, referring to Goldberg’s contact information and adviser Mike Waltz’s phone.

“Well that’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Waltz replied.

“But that’s a pretty big problem—”

“That’s why we’ve got the best technical minds, right?”

“That’s disturbing.”

“I mean, I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was … said one person and then a different phone number [came up],” Waltz replied.

“But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s [Goldberg’s] number on your phone?” pressed Ingraham, asking the most obvious question in all this.

“Well if you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it sucked it in,” Waltz said, seemingly trying to convince even himself.

“Oh, someone sent you that contact….. Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn’t on the chat?”

“So the person that I thought was on there was never on there.”

“Who was that?”

“Well, look, Laura, I take responsibility, I built the group.”

Trump echoed Waltz’s retelling of events, directly blaming a lower-level staffer.

“What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line, with permission—somebody that was with Mike Waltz, worked for Mike Waltz, at a lower level—had, I guess, Goldberg’s number, and called through the app. And somehow this guy ended up on the call,” the president said, who seemed to think this was some kind of conference call.

“It wasn’t classified as I understand it, there was no classified information, there was no problem. And the attack was a tremendous success. So I can only go by what I’ve been told, I wasn’t involved in it.”

The White House has claimed over and over that there were no war plans and nothing classified within the Signal chat. The screenshots that Goldberg first published—and the others he posted Tuesday after being called a liar by the administration—directly contradict that.

Republicans are struggling to defend the Signal group chat set up by Trump administration officials to discuss airstrikes against targets in Yemen. The chat, as the entire world now knows, mistakenly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic after a personal invite from Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz.

The chat may have violated the law and certainly went against Department of Defense regulations, including a warning one week ago about security vulnerabilities within the Signal app that were being targeted by Russian hacking groups. But that hasn’t stopped leading Republicans in Congress from trying to put a positive spin on the colossal mistake.

Senator Ted Cruz said that the substance of the group’s discussion should have Americans feeling “very encouraged.”

“What the entire text thread is about is President Trump directed his national security team to take out the terrorists and open up the shipping lanes. That’s terrific,” Cruz told journalists on Tuesday.

Senator Josh Hawley also tried to put a positive spin on the fiasco. “It’s the president’s advisers discussing among themselves options they might recommend to the president,” Hawley told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “and nobody can deny the success of what the president is doing here.

“And this is what the leftist media is reduced to. They can’t argue with the policies, which the American people support. They can’t argue with this new demonstration of American strength that is keeping Americans safe at home and abroad, and so now we’re griping about who’s on a text message and who’s not. I mean, come on,” Hawley added.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to push the same message.

“What you did see, though, I think, was top-level officials doing their job, doing it well and executing on a plan with precision,” Johnson said Monday night. “That mission was a success. No one was jeopardized because of it. We’re grateful for that.”

Representative Dan Crenshaw told Fox Business that “it’s a mistake and we gotta move on.”

“If Secretary Hegseth says there was no classified information, I’ll take him at his word,” Crenshaw said to Maria Bartiromo Tuesday morning.

None of these Republicans addressed the fact that government officials were having a serious national security discussion on a private messaging app that could easily be used to evade mandated record keeping. This could be one of many chat groups where government business is being discussed, but only happened to see the light of day due to a journalist being added by accident. Will anyone involved be held accountable?