During his campaign for a second term, former president Donald Trump has proposed a string of tax giveaways: He has suggested “no tax on tips,” an idea he said he heard from a waitress in Nevada. He has declared that no one, regardless of income, should have to pay taxes on Social Security benefits or income earned working overtime hours.

Most recently, he called for making car-loan interest payments tax-deductible and said he doesn’t want Americans living abroad to pay U.S. taxes.

The slew of proposals have been popular with his supporters, and in some cases resonated outside Trump’s political base: Vice President Kamala Harris has followed Trump in supporting a more limited tax exemption for tips.

But Trump’s ideas add up to a version of tax policy that offers little in the way of a coherent, overarching vision — especially in the eyes of conservative tax policy experts who had hoped that a second Trump administration would bring a complete overhaul of the American income tax structure.

“Trump has come up with these himself,” said Stephen Moore, a Trump economic adviser and Heritage Foundation fellow who said he and others crafting tax plans have sometimes been surprised to hear the candidate announce ideas they never heard about.

“Look, he’s the candidate. If he wins, he’s going to be the president. We’re all just advisers. … But he is a businessman and he does know how the economy works.”

Despite Trump’s promotion of rewards and tax breaks for certain groups, Moore and another Heritage fellow, David Burton, said they think some ideas floated among conservatives — such as reducing the number of income tax brackets to just two — might still be on the table in a future Trump administration, if Republicans in Congress favor simplifying the tax code and Trump gets behind their plans.

“I think what you’re going to see if Trump wins in 2025 is a wholesale review of the whole tax system,” Moore said. “It will be one of those once-in-a-generation opportunities to potentially really clean out the whole tax system.”

If implemented, some of Trump’s ideas could have significant impact on the federal government’s finances. The Yale Budget Lab has estimated the cost of making car-loan interest deductible at up to $173 billion over 10 years, of not taxing tips at $107 billion over a decade, and of not taxing overtime at $866 billion over a decade. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that not taxing Social Security benefits would cost even more — more than $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

Trump has also pledged to extend the tax cuts he oversaw in 2017, many of which are set to expire in 2025. Keeping that promise could mean giving up trillions in federal revenue, which could also appeal to conservatives who have long argued for shrinking the size of the U.S. government.

But Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric leaves some conservatives questioning whether broad reform of the tax system would ever be a goal under his administration.

“You might call it an exemption approach, a targeted approach or a populist approach,” Tax Foundation vice president William McBride said of Trump’s promises. “Tax reform, in general, means to go back and remove all of these types of special preferences and exemptions … so this is really going in the opposite direction of what is commonly understood to be fundamental tax reform. I can’t say I’m a fan of it.”

Others said Trump might run on popular sound bites but endorse conservatives’ broader plans if they get through Congress. “I do think these one-off proposals just reflect him campaigning,” American Enterprise Institute tax researcher Kyle Pomerleau said. “He would be willing to put his name on a large piece of legislation that reforms the tax code.”

Moore and Burton are two of the authors of a chapter on how to remake the tax system in the 900-page policy book compiled by the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025. Trump has disavowed that effort, but Burton described the Project 2025 goal as nothing more than “fairly conventional long-standing conservative and pro-market tax policy.” Their chapter called for flattening tax brackets in the near future, which would raise taxes on low-income earners and reduce them for the rich. In the long run, the authors wrote, the United States should replace income taxes altogether with a tax on spending.

“In principle, we would like to have a tax base that’s loophole-free and that leads to less distortions and enables lower tax rates,” said Burton, who is not advising Trump’s campaign.

Trump’s ideas have veered away from the principles that experts have tried to advance for tax reform, said Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia Business School. “It’s not really clear what the overarching goal would be of the proposals, beyond a sprinkling of really-hard-to-justify carve-outs that create false distinctions between one type of income and another,” he said. “They’re the kind of proposals that sound casually appealing … but what they could end up doing is massively increasing inequality and creating big loopholes for high-income earners.”

In some cases, Trump is directly contradicting his own prior policies — such as the question of capping deductions for state and local taxes. Trump’s 2017 law capped such deductions at $10,000, and some Republicans have called for allowing no SALT deductions at all. Recently, Trump said the opposite: He would favor renewing unlimited SALT deductions.

“Eventually, with a good tax system, you want a broad tax base and a low tax rate. That’s one of the basic principles,” Moore said, admitting that while he likes some of Trump’s specific campaign-trail ideas, Trump seems to be moving in the opposite direction. “I don’t know the answer to this: Is Congress in the mood for doing smaller things like Trump is talking about which are helping isolated groups? Or will President Trump, if he gets reelected, go for the gold and go for a rewrite of the whole tax system consolidating the brackets and lowering the rates?”

Over 35 seasons working as a ranger in Glacier National Park, Kim Peach, 67, recalls only two incidents in which he responded to a report of a gun being fired — and both became his most memorable days on the job.

So last year, when he spotted an advertisement featuring a smiling Tim Sheehy running for Senate, Peach immediately recognized the ex-Navy SEAL’s face, he said. It was the same man who had told him years earlier that he had accidentally shot himself in the right arm after his gun dropped to the ground while he said he was loading up gear after a hike.

Last spring, Peach shared his account of ticketing Sheehy $525 for discharging a weapon in Glacier National Park in Oct. of 2015 with The Washington Post — an account that was backed up by U.S. District Court and national park documents from the incident. The Post allowed him to speak on the condition of anonymity at the time because he feared political retaliation. But Laura Loomer and other conservative pundits quickly shared his identity online after the story published, leading to harassment, Peach said.

Now, angry at what he sees as Sheehy’s refusal to own up to the truth, Peach is speaking on the record to lend weight to his account of what happened 9 years ago. The Montana candidate, who looks poised to defeat Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester and likely help flip the Senate to Republican control next year, has said he has a bullet lodged in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan. When asked earlier this year about the Glacier National Park incident, Sheehy said he lied to the ranger when he told him he had a fresh gunshot wound that day, in order to prevent the authorities from finding out about a potential friendly fire incident from 2012, which he feared could spark a military investigation.

Peach finds that hard to believe. “The truth isn’t complicated,” he said.

Sheehy campaign spokeswoman Katie Martin dismissed Peach as a partisan activist, pointing out that he attacks former president Donald Trump in one of his photos on Facebook. (Peach, a Democrat, is wearing a “Make Lying Wrong Again” hat in the photo.)

“Anyone trying to take away from the fact that Tim Sheehy signed up for war as a young man and spent most of his 20s in some of the most dangerous places in the world is either a partisan hack, a journalist with an agenda, or outright a disgusting person,’ Martin said.

“Tim has been and will continue to be a humble servant of our great nation, our veterans, and the men and women he admirably served with,” she continued. ‘He got into this race to put our country first and he won’t ever let any of this slander stop him from fighting every day as Montana’s next U.S. Senator.”

That October day in 2015 took an unexpected turn when Peach got a call on his radio directing him to the parking lot of Logan Pass, a popular Glacier National Park destination, after a dispatcher received a report that someone had accidentally shot himself there. The dispatcher later directed Peach to a hospital instead, saying the victim was now there, according to the ranger’s memory and his written report at the time. Sheehy, then a young businessman on a hike with his family, told Peach at the hospital he had accidentally shot himself with his Colt .45 revolver after it fell off a pile of gear in the back of his vehicle and misfired.

The doctor who treated his wound decided to leave the bullet in his right arm, Sheehy told Peach, and Sheehy seemed relieved no one else had been hurt. “I remember Sheehy obviously being embarrassed by the situation but at the same time thankful that it wasn’t worse,” Peach said.

His story that day seemed eminently believable to Peach. The only other incident where a gun fired in the park that he responded to involved someone accidentally firing a bullet into his own leg. In the Sheehy case, Peach said he confiscated and examined the gun in the parking lot of the hospital and saw a spent bullet casing in the cylinder, indicating the revolver had been fired. He returned the weapon after Sheehy paid the fine. In April, the Sheehy campaign did not respond to the ranger’s contention that he inspected the weapon or saw a missing bullet, but noted Peach did not mention a missing bullet in his report from the time. His lawyer called the ranger’s more recent recollections “a fabrication.”

In a statement Sheehy wrote in 2015 as part of the investigation into the gunshot, he wrote that he was “grateful no other persons or property were damaged” in the incident.

But in April, Sheehy told The Post that he sought medical attention that day because he fell during a hike and feared he had dislodged a bullet in his arm from Afghanistan that he had never reported to his superiors, for fear of sparking an investigation into its origins. He said hospital staff reported the gunshot wound to the local authorities, even though it was not fresh. Then, Sheehy said, he lied to Peach when the ranger came to investigate and said he had accidentally shot himself to avoid potentially triggering a military investigation into his former unit.

Sheehy, who received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with valor during his service for actions unrelated to the gunshot wound, said in April that he never reported the 2012 gunshot injury and believes the bullet may have been the result of friendly fire during a night mission.

Sheehy’s lawyer argued then that the weapon he was carrying in 2015, a Colt .45 long, could not misfire when dropped. A ballistics expert consulted by The Post said it would be very unlikely for the gun to misfire.

His campaign initially said in the spring that Sheehy was seeking hospital records from 2015 to verify his account, but later ignored questions from The Post about whether he had obtained those records or would release them. In May, Sheehy told Montana Public radio that it’s “insulting and ridiculous” that he would need to provide medical records from the incident after “serving my country and being wounded overseas.”

In April, a former teammate recalled Sheehy saying he was struck by a ricochet bullet while they were serving together in 2012. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is a military reservist and said he was not authorized to talk to the media. The Sheehy campaign put him in touch with The Post. Other service members who served with Sheehy in Afghanistan either declined to comment or could not recall him discussing a gunshot wound.

Sheehy’s forceful denial that a gun ever went off in Glacier National Park has angered Peach, who feels that the candidate has muddied the waters by saying he lied to him in 2015. Peach — who is also a veteran, although not a combat veteran — also does not agree with the way Sheehy has suggested reporting on the incident is out of bounds.

“He said that questioning his military service was ‘disgusting,’” Peach said. “What is disgusting is saying a wound from a negligent, accidental firearm discharge is a wound received in combat.”

The ranger, a Democrat, said he hopes he would come forward with his story no matter what political party Sheehy belonged to. “I have no personal vendetta against Tim Sheehy. But when a person makes a statement that’s not true somebody has to call them on it,” he said.

Peach pointed out that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has clarified that he “misspoke” when he’s said in the past that he had carried “weapons of war” while at war during his time in the service, though he did not serve in combat. “Tim Sheehy should do the same,” he said.

Peach started out on the park’s fire crew in 1986, after studying natural resource conservation at a university in Minnesota, and then moved into wildlife management. He went to the police academy in the late 1990s and became a law enforcement ranger.

At the time of their encounter, Peach felt a lot of sympathy for Sheehy as a fellow veteran who quickly took responsibility for the incident. “I just thought they’re a young couple with two kids who had an unfortunate accident,” he recalled of Sheehy and his wife, Carmen.

But now, his dismay has grown as he questions Sheehy’s account of what happened, and as the candidate looks increasingly likely to become a U.S. senator.

“He’s tough enough to keep a bullet in him for two or three years and then slips and falls, bumps his elbow and asks to go to the emergency room?” Peach asked. “His story just has so many holes.”

Donald Trump has long argued that he avoids policy specifics because it limits his ability to negotiate. If he states publicly that he wants to do Specific Thing X, this suggests, his ability to pressure trade partners is hamstrung by their understanding his bottom line.

You can see how this would appeal to Trump. It certainly comports with his experience prior to seeking the presidency, though it fails to account for the fact that the negotiating position of the U.S. government is magnitudes of order more robust than any private company. (He did come to appreciate the way in which the government could offer leverage of its own.) It also lets him avoid getting into policy specifics, something in which he’s never demonstrated any actual interest.

In the 2016 campaign, there was one policy point for which he regularly offered detailed specifics: his proposed wall on the border between the United States and Mexico. Often mentioning his background in construction, he would talk about how deep its foundations would go and which materials would provide the most effective barrier. Most of all, though, he’d talk about how tall it was going to be.

“You take precast plank,” Trump said in August 2015. “It comes 30 feet long, 40 feet long, 50 feet long.” You could easily make a 30-foot wall out of that. Or, as he said in February 2016, maybe it would be 35 to 40 feet tall. And so on.

Eventually, he moved away from those specifics in favor of using the wall as a measure of how mad he was at immigrants and their defenders. A few minutes after predicting a 40-foot wall, a journalist noted that (despite Trump’s pledge) Mexico said it wouldn’t pay for the wall. Well, Trump replied, “the wall just got higher.”

This became a tagline: The wall just got 10 feet higher! His crowds ate it up, understanding that he wasn’t saying the wall would actually be 80 feet tall or whatever but, instead, that the wall was a representation of how Trump would lash out against the things they disliked. Oh, Mexico doesn’t like a 40-foot wall? Well, how about a 50-foot-tall one. The D.C. elites think that’s ridiculous and counterproductive? Now it’s 60 feet tall. Keep going, guys, and see how tall the wall gets.

Eight years later, Trump’s campaign is centered on another policy proposal that mirrors how he once talked about the wall: tariffs.

Like the wall, Trump embraces tariffs because they are viewed as punitive. He can tell his audience that the imposition of fees on imports will serve as a way to punish the Chinese and other foreign manufacturers. As with the wall, the tariffs would end up being paid for by Americans (since the costs of tariffs are paid by the importer, who passes a big chunk of those costs on to buyers). But, as with the wall, Trump assures his followers that it’s the foreigners who will feel the pain.

Then there’s the fake, malleable specificity of the scale of tariffs. Instead of talking about height, Trump keeps talking about percentages. Maybe the tariffs on goods from foreign countries will be 20 percent. Maybe the ones on products from China will be 60 percent. Maybe he’d double or triple the overall price. Maybe the tariffs would surge to 1,000 percent!

These are not serious proposals, any more than a 60-foot wall was. The inflated numbers serve not as a prediction of what he’ll do but, instead, as a measure of how mad he is at the people who would pay the price (at least according to him).

Speaking to Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo over the weekend, Trump assured her that the numbers he was offering wouldn’t go into effect — because, he said, companies would be scared into manufacturing their products domestically.

“So you’re not going to actually push prices higher?” Bartiromo said. “That’s your thinking?”

Of course, Trump assured her. Yes, he was saying he’d impose a 200 percent tariff, but he was “using that just as a figure of speech.” She pointed out that he used that particular figure a lot, to which he replied, “Well, I will say 100, 200. I will say 500. I don’t care.”

The point isn’t the specific. The point is the rhetorical effect.

Some Trump allies have argued that this is the important point: He wouldn’t actually implement tariffs that would have a predictable inflationary effect on the American consumers who would end up incurring the costs. Instead, he’s just staking out an extreme position from which he can negotiate.

The problem with that argument is seen in Trump’s actual presidency, particularly when contrasting his rhetoric around tariffs with what he said about the wall. Halfway through his term in office, he began facing criticism from right-wing media personalities for failing to build any wall. So he forced a government shutdown in an effort to get funding for a wall, eventually giving up that fight in favor of declaring a national emergency that allowed him to appropriate funding from other places, mostly the military. The wall was built.

Trump would almost certainly feel similar pressure to implement tariffs, purported punitive measures against foreign manufacturers. He imposed tariffs when he was in office the first time around! The question isn’t whether he’d do this but, instead, how broadly they’d be implemented.

For now, though, the point of Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs isn’t to offer a precise explanation for how he’d use the tool to advance American interests. As with his talk about the wall in 2016, it’s to present himself as an outside-the-box thinker, someone who will buck convention (and the warnings of economists) to inflict damage against foreign companies and countries. And the more you complain about it, the more damage he says he’s going to inflict.

Should he win the election, tariffs will follow. They won’t be 1,000 percent any more than the wall was 60 feet tall. (It ended up being about 30 feet.) But, given Trump’s interest in saving face, they won’t be zero.

On the lengthy menu of unusual aspects to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, one item stands out: his consistent and diverse efforts to sell things to his supporters.

All presidential candidates make pitches to their supporters, of course, often to the point of irritation. But those appeals are generally centered on efforts to get campaign contributions, money that the campaigns can then spend on getting the candidate elected. But while Trump’s campaign is making those sorts of appeals, the candidate himself is also spending time and energy selling other things for his own account: sneakers, digital images, Bibles, some sort of crypto something or other.

This is unusual for a presidential candidate but not really surprising for Trump, who has spent a lot longer trying to make money by putting his name on stuff than he has been a Republican. There’s a distinct farewell-tour vibe to his third consecutive presidential campaign, from a not-politically-useful campaign event at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27 to the seeming everything-must-go effort to unload a wide array of Trump-branded items.

All well and good for Trump, but not that great for his campaign.

The New York Times looked at the “creative bookkeeping” it said the campaign was undertaking to expand its relatively modest coffers. That phrase is a fraught one. Earlier this year Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for using “creative bookkeeping,” if you will: creative bookkeeping specifically centered on hiding money that was spent to boost his 2016 campaign. That is one way to run a low-cost presidential campaign: skirt the laws around transparency.

Another is to outsource campaign functions. Trump’s team has done this in some obvious ways, including tasking outside groups with running his turnout efforts. But the effort goes well beyond that, with the Times noting that his campaign had only 11 employees on its payroll in August, the most recent month for which full spending data was available.

This is in part because the campaign has offloaded its direct voter contact, which often means setting up offices in targeted states and hiring people to staff them and do the actual outreach. It is in part, too, because the campaign is “bending the rules to their breaking point,” in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Dan Weiner, who spoke to the Times. Consider that in 2020, Trump’s campaign employed more than 200 people in August. And even that was modest: In August 2012, Barack Obama’s reelection bid employed about 900.

If we visualize the August spending by each major-party campaign since 2012, we can see just how small the purple “payroll” sliver is in the 2024 spending for Trump. (The circles below are scaled to total spending.)

Both in terms of raw spending and as a percentage of total August spending, Trump’s 2024 campaign expenditures on staff are modest. (You can also see that a lot of those August 2020 employees weren’t making very much.)

Trump has always run lean campaigns. In 2016 — thanks in part to offloading $130,000 in expenses to the Trump Organization — his campaign spent about $353 million, or $240 million less than Hillary Clinton and $130 million less than Mitt Romney four years prior.

But it’s obviously the case that, with more money coming into the campaign, his campaign would have more money to spend: money to spend on ads, money to spend on staff. Perhaps he feels little urgency to do so, given that he is running about even with Vice President Kamala Harris, even though she was outspending him by more than 2 to 1 as of the most recent filing period. Why worry about raising more?

Especially when he could instead push those supporters to buy things that put money in his bank account, rather than the campaign’s.

North Carolinians set a record on the first day of early voting in the state, casting 353,166 ballots on Thursday and becoming the second battleground state this week to top its previous mark.

Voting proceeded at a brisk pace despite the carnage from Hurricane Helene, which devastated the western part of the state late last month. The state was able to open 76 polling sites across the 25 counties declared federal disaster areas, only four fewer than planned.

The first-day totals in North Carolina, released by the state Board of Elections on Friday morning, only slightly bested the first-day numbers in 2020, near the height of the coronavirus pandemic. But Thursday’s figure blew past that of other recent election years.

Earlier in the week, Georgia doubled its day one record, and early voting remained robust through the week. As of Friday morning, more than 960,000 Georgia voters had cast ballots since early in-person voting began Tuesday — nearly 20 percent of the total number who voted in 2020 and more than double the number who had voted during the same period four years ago.

The numbers suggest voter enthusiasm — at least among some — is high in both states, though it is difficult to know how much they show beyond that. Former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are polling neck-in-neck in both Georgia and North Carolina, either of which could be decisive in determining who wins the White House.

Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at North Carolina’s Catawba College, said early voting showed an equal number of Democrats and Republicans cast ballots on Thursday, a dramatic change from 2020, when more Democrats took advantage of early voting on the first day.

“There’s a great deal of interest in both sides of the aisle,” Bitzer said. “The great unknown is what are the unaffiliateds doing. We don’t have a good sense of where they may be landing in all of this.”

In 2020, Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by fewer than 80,000 votes, his smallest margin of victory in any state. In Georgia, Biden prevailed by an even narrower margin, which Trump contested.

Republicans have made a concerted push to encourage their voters to cast ballots early or by mail even as Trump has continued to baselessly undermine the legitimacy of both methods.

In North Carolina, where nearly two-thirds tend to vote early, an additional 73,133 ballots have been cast by mail. Other key battlegrounds have already seen large numbers of mail-in ballots, including 857,270 in Michigan, 690,891 in Pennsylvania, 283,123 in Wisconsin and 172,145 in Arizona, according to data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Early in-person voting kicks off in parts of Michigan on Saturday, including Detroit. Harris and Trump were both campaigning in the area on Friday, and Harris was expected to hold another event in Detroit on Saturday.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump compared the detention of his supporters who have been charged or convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to the mass imprisonment of people of Japanese descent without charges during World War II.

The remark, in an interview with pro-Trump radio host Dan Bongino that aired on Friday, was the latest escalation in Trump’s defense and glorification of charged and convicted rioters, including some who attacked police officers. Trump has repeatedly pledged to pardon the defendants and called for their immediate release.

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,500 people in the Capitol breach, including 1,200 who pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial. Nearly 600 were charged with assaulting police or rioting, while the majority were misdemeanors such as trespassing or disorderly conduct on restricted Capitol grounds. At least five people died during or immediately after the violence, which injured 140 officers and delayed Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.

“Nobody’s ever been treated like this,” Trump said in Friday’s interview. “Nobody’s ever — maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. But you know, they were held too.”

In 1942, following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, the federal government forcibly evacuated and detained about 112,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including 70,000 U.S. citizens. None of the detainees were individually charged or held on any individual suspicion, and they had no opportunity to contest their denial of liberty, according to the National Archives.

In 1988, Congress officially apologized for the injustice of imprisonment and paid $20,000 to each incarcerated person.

“It’s flat-out offensive. It’s a night-and-day difference what happened,” David Inoue, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, said of Trump’s comparison. “Japanese Americans’ whole families were incarcerated without any sort of trial — their own crime was they were of Japanese descent. For these January 6 people, they have had their day in court, they’ve either been indicted or convicted of crimes, and that is why they’re being incarcerated.”

Inoue also raised concern about Trump’s proposal last week in Aurora, Colo., of a mass deportation operation citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify Japanese incarceration.

The U.S. Supreme Court sustained incarceration camps in a 1944 decision called Korematsu v. United States that established broad deference to the president’s war powers. The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees technically overturned the Korematusu ruling in their 2018 decision that upheld Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries, over the objection of Democratic-appointed justices who said both decisions used the same underlying logic.

In Friday’s interview, Trump questioned the ongoing imprisonment of some Jan. 6 defendants based on a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that said prosecutors misapplied an obstruction charge in some cases. The decision did not automatically free anyone but affected the cases of 259 people charged with or convicted of that crime. No one was charged with that crime alone, according to the Justice Department.

As of Oct. 6, one defendant received a reduced sentence because of the decision, and prosecutors said they do not oppose dropping the charge in about 49 affected cases that were already adjudicated. For 126 affected cases that are still pending, prosecutors said they dropped the charge for 73 defendants and are still pursuing it for 13 while reviewing others.

“This is an egregiously inaccurate and flawed historical analogy,” said Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. “There is no comparison between between the treatment received by the January 6 rioters and Japanese Americans who were denied due process when they were forcibly removed from their homes, systematically dispossessed and incarcerated for the duration of the war. Now more than ever, the lessons from the Japanese American incarceration must never be forgotten, ignored, minimized, or erased.”

Trump also repeated a false claim about weapons at the riot. Six people were arrested on Jan. 6 while having guns in the vicinity of the Capitol, and a seventh the next day. Police officers testified to observing more weapons that they did not confiscate because of their focus on defending the Capitol. More than a dozen people have been charged with bringing weapons to D.C., and others acknowledged stashing them at hotels or other locations. Some who brought guns were not charged with firearms offenses.

“Nobody was killed and there were no guns involved,” Trump said in the interview.

Trump repeated the same falsehood on Wednesday during a Univision town hall. In those remarks, he used the first person plural to group himself with the rioters.

“We didn’t have guns,” Trump said. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”

Later on Friday, Trump reposted a social media meme falsely accusing the government of stealing the 2020 election and staging the Jan. 6 riot.

Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.