Once he left the White House and was settled in Florida, former President Donald Trump told British filmmaker Alex Holder what the 2020 election taught him.
His comments were part of the third and final episode in the “Unprecedented” documentary that premiered on Discovery+ early Sunday morning.
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The former president took his fight from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, where he continued to make unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was “very unfair.”
The new documentary shows the former president said the election would be rigged long before it began, and he has held to those claims since being voted out of office. It’s one of many things that has been publicly reported before the documentary was released.
All of the Trump campaign’s claims of a fraudulent election were debunked, ruled against or tossed by more than 60 judges, including many conservative judges whom he appointed.
The three-episode documentary premiered on Discovery+ on Sunday, two days before the next Jan. 6 hearing is scheduled on Capitol Hill. That hearing is expected to show how the mob was assembled on the National Mall.
Through “Unprecedented,” Holder gained up-close access to Trump, his family and closest allies beginning in September 2020, throughout Jan. 6 and for months after Trump left office.
“Unprecedented” includes top Trump administration officials, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
Holder has said the Trump family had no control over what would be in the documentary.
“As a British filmmaker, I had no agenda coming into this,” he said on Twitter. “We simply wanted to better understand who the Trumps were and what motivated them to hold onto power so desperately.”
Here are some of the moments included in “Unprecedented”:
What Trump said after Jan. 6
Holder’s documentary provides “never-before-seen” footage of the former first family and how Trump reacted immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection, he said in a statement last month.
Eleven hours of documentary footage has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, but Sunday marked the first time the footage – about three hours’ worth – was publicly released. Holder testified behind closed doors to the committee on June 23, and the committee is expected to incorporate Holder’s testimony and the film into an upcoming hearing.
One of the most anticipated parts of the documentary was what Trump and his children said on or after Jan. 6. But Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. all declined to be interviewed by Holder about Jan. 6 after violence broke out at the Capitol.
Pence also declined to talk to the documentarian about Jan. 6, but the footage shows him smiling as he received an email calling on him and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. That moment was previously reported by CNN.
The former president said Jan. 6 was “a sad day” and minimized the crowd size at the Capitol – an unusual move for Trump, who has always boasted about the number of his supporters.
“Well it was a sad day, but it was a day where there was great anger in our country,” Trump said in the third episode of the documentary. “People went to Washington primarily because they were angry with an election that they think was rigged. A very small portion, as you know, went down to the Capitol, and then a very small portion of them went in. But I will tell you they were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election because they’re smart and they see and they saw what happened. And I believe that that was a big part of what happened on January 6th.”
Trump also responded on camera Jan. 8, 2021, when he was banned on Facebook and Twitter “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
“These people are thugs,” he said. “I’m not a horrific person. I have a big voice. I have a voice that had hundreds of millions of people listening. So it’s going to be adjudicated over a period of time. We’ll see how it turns out.”