Aide reveals Trump kept ‘gleefully’ rewinding Capitol riot footage to celebrate it

Grisham said she and other disillusioned former Trump staffers are gathering to discuss how to stop him before 2024

As rioters breached the Capitol building and attacked police officers on 6 January, 2021, the world waited anxiously for then-President Donald Trump to make a statement. According to one aide, Mr Trump was busy watching the Capitol riot, over and over and over again.

Mr Trump's former press secretary Stephanie Grisham told CNN Thursday that she saw Mr Trump sitting in the White House dining room rewinding and rewatching the footage.

“He was in the dining room gleefully watching on his TV as he often did, [saying] ‘Look at all the people fighting for me’, hitting rewind, watching it again, that’s all that I know,” she said.

She also claims that the first lady did nothing to encourage her husband to call off the attack on the Capitol.

Ms Grisham met with the House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on Wednesday. The committee is currently trying to determine what Mr Trump was doing during the three hour period of time he was silent while his supporters attacked police at the Capitol.

During her interview on Thursday, she said she spent “about an hour” speaking with the committee and said she answered “every question they asked of me, and I'm going to continue to cooperate”.

She also revealed on Thursday that she and other currently unnamed former Trump officials were planning to meet next week in order to plan how they can help stop Mr Trump's continuing attempts to “manipulate people and divide our country”.

“Next week, a group of former Trump staff are going to come together, administration officials are going to come together and we're going to talk about how we can formally do some things to try and stop him and also, the extremism, that that kind of violence, rhetoric that has been talked about and continues to divide our country,” she said.

Follow live updates on the January 6 anniversary

Ms Grisham also revealed that she hopes to “travel the country and talk to people who are believers like I once was” to explain “who [Mr Trump] really is”.

“I'm hoping that people will talk to somebody like me or some of these other people who really did believe in Trump and understand you can be proud of his policies, you can still be behind a lot of the America First policies that he implemented, which I am, but it doesn't have to be him. It just doesn't have to be this man who has caused such chaos and destruction in the country,” she said.