Dan Rather has seen a lot in his life and career, but he says he has never seen anything like what happened yesterday. He joined Jimmy Fallon Wednesday night to talk about an “unprecedented day in which as a country, as a people, we embarrassed ourselves.” 

“Here’s the thing, we have never seen this in or country before an effort to overthrow the legitimate vote of the people in a presidential election. This was by any dictionary definition a coup attempt which is to say, okay, we’ve had an election, we, this mob, we don’t agree with the outcome of the election, which even the courts have certified in their own way. And we’re going to overturn it that’s a definition of a coup. And I do think it could be described as a case of domestic violence not everybody in this crowd of people were violent today. Not nearly everybody but there certainly were outright rioters who were taking part in domestic violence and the overall scene was one of a coup attempt. It has failed. That’s pretty much where we are.” 

As someone who has covered presidents since the 1960s Dan says, “I think that history is going to judge that President Trump primarily responsible for what happened today.”

“The power of the presidency is a power to inspire and/or to incite and clearly, President Trump has been trying to incite just this kind of action. There’s no — you know, I don’t see that there’s any real argument about it… The buck starts with President Trump and it goes through those members of his party, the Republican party. Not all members of the Republican party but a really large majority of members of the Republican party have aided and abetted the president in convincing a large section of the American public that Joe Biden could be an illegitimate president.”

Watch the interview above.