What phrase did Donald Trump say immediately before "fight like hell" on January 6 2021?
Executive summary
The words that immediately precede the phrase "fight like hell" in Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, Ellipse speech are a short, emphatic pair: "And we fight. We fight like hell." This wording — often quoted in longer variants that continue into "And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore" — appears in multiple official transcripts and investigative accounts of the speech [1] [2] [3].
1. What the transcript shows in plain view
The most direct textual record of the moment shows Trump saying "And we fight. We fight like hell," immediately before he expanded the line into the consequential clause "And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," a continuation captured in the Select Committee report and other transcriptions [2] [1]. Major contemporaneous and subsequent transcripts and reporting reproduce that same phrasing, indicating the immediate predecessor to "fight like hell" is the short sentence "We fight" — sometimes uttered as "And we fight" in the flow of his remarks [3] [4].
2. How that fragment has been framed in reporting and litigation
News organizations, the House Select Committee, and legal commentators consistently quote the cluster of lines together — "We fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell..." — because the immediate one‑sentence lead‑in ("We fight") sits within a longer exhortation that courts and analysts have scrutinized for its potential to incite [2] [1]. Legal commentary has treated the "peacefully and patriotically" phrasing elsewhere in the speech as relevant background but not as nullifying the impact of the later "We fight…fight like hell" passage [1] [5].
3. Context matters: short phrase versus surrounding text
While the literal phrase immediately before "fight like hell" is the succinct "We fight" (or "And we fight"), that fragment was embedded in a paragraph of escalating language — including appeals to strength, attacks on "weak" Republicans, and instructions to "walk down to the Capitol" — which many sources cite when assessing the words' likely effect on listeners [4] [3]. The January 6 Select Committee emphasized that Trump told the crowd to "march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol" and then used the "fight like hell" language, connecting the sentence-level phrasing to his directive and subsequent events [2].
4. Dissenting emphases and the "peaceful" line
Defenders and some later statements by Trump have emphasized earlier, scripted phrases in the speech — notably "peacefully and patriotically" — pointing to that language as evidence he did not intend violence [5] [6]. Reporting and legal analysis, however, note that the "peacefully and patriotically" clause appears separately and earlier in the speech, and commentators have argued that it does not erase the later "We fight…fight like hell" exhortation nor the instruction to head to the Capitol [5] [2].
5. Why the immediate phrasing matters legally and rhetorically
The precise words directly before "fight like hell" — the terse "We fight" or "And we fight" — matter because courts and commentators treat exact language, tone, and adjacent instructions as part of the contextual synthesis used to evaluate whether a speaker crossed from persuasion to incitement [1] [2]. Scholars and litigants therefore rarely isolate the two words in isolation; instead they read "We fight" as the immediate lead-in to a sequence that culminated in "fight like hell" and the warning about the country, a sequence repeatedly cited in investigative and academic accounts [1] [2].