What did Trump say immediately after urging supporters to fight like hell?

1. The line that matters: from “fight like hell” to marching to the Capitol

In the recorded Ellipse speech, Trump used the phrase “fight like hell” and then told the audience they would proceed to the Capitol, saying “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” and declaring he would be “with you,” a sequence preserved in multiple official transcriptions and reporting of the January 6 remarks ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

2. How contemporaneous records present the sequence

Transcripts published by outlets and repositories that archived the rally capture the same immediate transition: exhortation to “fight” followed by an explicit call to head to the Capitol, language that the BBC and fact‑checkers highlighted when assessing whether the speech could foreseeably lead to lawless action ^{[4] [3]}.

3. Competing framings: “peacefully and patriotically” vs. “fight like hell”

The speech also contains the words “peacefully and patriotically,” a phrase the White House and Trump’s defenders have pointed to as evidence of nonviolent intent, but legal and journalistic analyses argue that those phrases sit uneasily with the contiguous “fight like hell” passage and the immediate instruction to march to the Capitol ^{[5] [6] [4]}.

4. How investigators, courts and committees treated the passage

Congressional investigators and later analysts treated the juxtaposition of “fight like hell” and the pledge to “walk down” to the Capitol as central evidence: the Jan. 6 Select Committee and reporting on hearings cited the exhortation and the subsequent direction to go to the Capitol when construing intent and foreseeability of violence ^{[7] [6] [1]}.

5. The contested aftermath: Trump’s later characterization and defensive line

Afterward, Trump and allies repeatedly characterized the event as a protest and described the speech as “calming,” with Trump later saying he had “nothing to hide” and contesting that his words incited the riot; those claims rely on selective reading of the transcript and have been widely disputed in news and legal commentary ^{[8] [9] [6]}.

6. What reporting cannot establish from the phrase alone

While the record clearly shows the immediate verbal sequence — “fight like hell,” followed by “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” and “I’ll be with you” — determining causation between the words and later actions requires broader evidentiary context (communications after the speech, social media, movements of attendees), material that investigators and courts examined separately and that cannot be fully reconstructed from the rally transcript alone ^{[1] [7] [6]}.