President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday was at Mar-a-Lago, his members-only club and home in Florida, nearly 1,000 miles away from the Capitol as a joint session of Congress certified his Electoral College victory on Monday.
He spent part of Sunday at his golf club in West Palm Beach, and had been described as relatively cheerful since winning the election two months ago.
But Jan. 6 unfolded much differently than it did four years ago, when a pro-Trump mob left a speech that he was giving near the White House and marched to the Capitol. Many clashed with law enforcement officers, forcefully entered the building and disrupted the proceedings.
The violence was the culmination of Mr. Trump’s weeks of lies about widespread fraud affecting the election and his refusal to acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the victor. Some in the crowd that day hunted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi while others threatened the sitting vice president, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Mr. Trump has spent the past four years trying to rewrite the events of Jan. 6, 2021, calling it a day of “love.”
On Saturday night at Mar-a-Lago, he sat in for a screening of a movie called “The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice.” It is unclear who produced the movie, but it focuses on the conservative lawyer John Eastman, who pushed a legal theory that Mr. Pence could have summarily stopped the certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College win during the Jan. 6 session. White House lawyers and other Trump advisers disagreed, but Mr. Trump became captivated by it.
Mr. Eastman ultimately lost his law license and was charged, along with a number of other Trump allies and advisers, in an election interference case in Arizona. He has maintained that he is the victim not of accountability efforts but of partisan attempts to damage conservatives.
On the eve of the joint session of Congress to certify his second victory, Mr. Trump continued to promote the debunked idea that Mr. Eastman was correct.
He greeted the several hundred attendees at the screening, standing onstage and talking into a hand-held microphone. He praised Mr. Eastman and said that his theory of Mr. Pence’s options was “right.”
“Those votes could have been sent back,” Mr. Trump said, referring to efforts on Jan. 6 to overturn slates of electors from several states. Without identifying anyone by name, he said that “they convinced” Mr. Pence “that he’s not allowed to do it.”
He singled out for praise three people standing near one another in the room: his onetime personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani; Peter Navarro, a trade adviser in the first Trump administration who will be returning as a senior counselor on trade and manufacturing; and Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser. They had either forcefully pushed the false claim of an election stolen through widespread fraud or endorsed the notion that Mr. Pence could affect the certification.
And Mr. Trump said he hoped that the movie was good. “Gotta be strong,” he said. “I hope they didn’t hold anything back.”
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