In a wide-ranging softball interview with Tucker Carlson that aired Wednesday night, former president Donald Trump spoke positively of the crowds who turned up at the Capitol on January 6. Tucker also allowed Trump to spread his 2020 election conspiracies unchecked. 

Carlson, in the pre-recorded interview published on X just before the GOP Republican primary debate got underway in Milwaukee, asked Trump if the country is moving toward a civil war. 

“There’s tremendous passion and there’s tremendous love,” Trump replied, going on to say that the day of the January 6 Capitol riot was a “very interesting day because they don’t report it properly.”

He said the crowd that turned up on January 6 was “the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken before.” He claims the media fails to report that he instructed protesters to “go patriotically and peacefully.”

“People that were in that crowd that day went down there — and there are a lot of scenarios we can talk about — but people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they’ve ever experienced,” he said. “There was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love and I’ve also never seen, simultaneously from the same people, such hatred of what they’ve done to our country.” 

As Trump dodged the question about whether the country is headed for a civil war, Carlson doubled back to ask if it’s “possible there’s open conflict” and suggested, “We seem to be moving toward something.” Trump was reluctant to agree or disagree. 

“I don’t know, I don’t know because I don’t know I can say this: there’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen, there’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen and that’s probably a bad combination,” he said.

Despite facing two separate criminal cases over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Trump continued to spread his false theories about the 2020 election being rigged. He suggested if lawmakers aren’t allowed to question an election, Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams should be indicted as well. “The Democrats don’t get indicted for things like that, they don’t get impeached,” he said.

Trump falsely claimed he beat Joe Biden in Wisconsin and repeated his false claims that former vice president Mike Pence had the “absolute right” to prevent the certification of electoral college votes in 2020. He claimed Pence, who is now running for president against him, was given “bad advice” and said he hasn’t spoken to him in a while and he was “very disappointed in him.”

Pence said earlier this month that he “had no right to overturn the election” and said that Trump’s assertions that he did have the authority are “completely false and . . . contrary to what our Constitution and the laws of this country provide.”

“You know, I’m a student of American history. And the first time I heard in early December somebody suggest that as vice president I might be able to decide which votes to reject and which to accept, I knew that it was false. . . . I dismissed it out of hand,” Pence added. “Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear.”

Meanwhile, Carlson asked Trump why, if the Democrats stole the election from him last time, they would not do it again.

“Oh well they’ll try,” he said, and suggested that if anyone other than him wins the Republican nomination, the Democrats will go after the nominee “just as viciously as they did me.” 

Trump blasted the “bullsh**” indictments against him and claimed he had every right to mishandle classified documents because of the Presidential Records Act. Trump faces 42 felony counts stemming from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Carlson asked Trump, “How do you get indicted every week and stay cheerful?”

Trump responded that his stature in the polls keeps in going because “it means people get it, they see it’s a fraud.”

Carlson suggested that if Trump could not be stopped by protests, impeachment efforts, or a series of indictments, that the next stage in Democrats’ efforts to stop him could be violence and asked whether Trump is worried they will try to kill him.

“They’re savage animals,” Trump said. “They are people that are sick, really sick.” Though he noted there are “great people in the Democrat party” and that he represents everyone in the country, regardless of party.

Carlson, meanwhile, failed to push back against Trump’s conspiracies and even peddled some of his own, suggesting that former U.S. attorney general Bill Barr lied about billionaire and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s cause of death in jail. Epstein died in 2019 of an apparent suicide in jail.

Trump, for his part, said while it’s “possible” Epstein was killed, he believes he “probably committed suicide.”

“He had a life with beautiful homes beautiful everything all of a sudden, he’s incarcerated and not doing well. I would say he did . . . But a lot of people think he was killed,” Trump said. 

The former president also explained his decision not to attend Wednesday night’s debate, saying he did not want to “sit there for an hour or two hours … and get harassed by people who shouldn’t even be running for president” on a network that hasn’t been friendly to him. He used former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson as an example of candidates who should not be running, and attacked him as “weak and pathetic.”