> I absolutely do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also believe that no such fraud was ever found.

I think that depends on how you interpret a lot of statements made by Trump and others[0], for instance:

    “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …

    “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …

    “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

If you're a Trump supporter, A patriot who believes in the revolutionary thesis of the Second Amendment and who's certain enough the election has been stolen to march on Washington, do these words encourage you to wait patiently and work within the system until the system is resolved, or do they communicate an urgent need for desperate action in a desperate time?

What's certain - and we know this from their own testimony and communications - is that many of the rioters believed they were acting under Trump's orders[1]. Where did this belief come from? Was there simply no relationship between the words coming from Trump and other Republicans, and what Trump supporters were hearing? After four years of paranoid rhetoric amongst the right about vast leftist conspiracies, violent Marxists in the streets, vaccines as fascism and now the election being stolen right before their eyes? Four years of the populist gospel of victimhood and the need to exact revenge upon the elites? When you, as a Trump supporter, see the courts throwing out lawsuit after lawsuit, and Republican Congressman Louis Gohmert suggests on TV that people should "go out and be violent like antifa[2]" how do you react?

On the spectrum of culpability from "Trump had absolutely nothing to do with anything" to "Trump literally planned it himself", I fall somewhere on the latter side. Where seems to depend on just how much Trumpists piss me off that day, I'll admit. Unfortunately, there's no smoking gun here.

But there's also no way Trump didn't at least understand the atmosphere he was creating, or really discourage it (until well after the damage was done, which isn't a good look.) I think at the very least he was hoping the chaos, whatever form it took, would benefit him.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/07/trump-incite...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html?a...

[2]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/louie-go...