Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House Committee investigating the events leading up to January 6, told CNN on Tuesday that it took former President Donald Trump six attempts to successfully film his statement asking rioters to go home that day.

If that seems excessive for such a simple statement, consider how many times Trump has gone wildly off course even in long-rehearsed and written-out speeches.

Reporters for the Washington Post released a book earlier this year entitled I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. In it, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker claim that Trump was constantly “veering off the script his speechwriters had prepared,” and that the final version was simply “the most palatable option” that the White House could have released.

That’s not enough for the House Committee, though, said Thompson.

The president, it took him six times for the video to say to the people to go home. If in the midst of an insurrection, it takes you six times to…ask the people to go home, something is wrong with that. I want to see what the other five videos said…His own people said to him, ‘this is not good enough. You are not telling these people to go home.’

Indeed, it seemed that day, if only by the length of time it took for Trump to even issue a statement, that he wasn’t interested in sending his supporters home. If he was involved in the planning of the incidents of that day, as is widely believed, he would have a vested interest in seeing how it all played out.

Trump was still tweeting negative things about his Vice President Mike Pence even while the actual attack was taking place. Pence was holed up in a parking garage below the Capitol when he saw Trump’s tweet saying he hadn’t been brave enough to overturn the election. Trump himself had already fled the area.

If there’s anything that I would like for Christmas this year, it would be the public release of the practice takes that Trump filmed before he could finally bring himself to ask his supporters to stop destroying America’s Capitol.

Here is the final video that was tweeted out that fateful day:

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