Sign up for your FREE personalized newsletter featuring insights, trends, and news for America's Active Baby Boomers

Newsletter
New

Jan. 6, 2021 Is In The Rearview. The Battle To Define It For History Is In Full Swing.

Card image cap


The battle of Jan. 6, 2021 was physical, a hand-to-hand fight on Capitol turf to stave off an insurrection aimed at keeping a defeated Donald Trump in power.

The battle of Jan. 6, 2025 is psychological, a struggle by Democrats, prosecutors and victims of the violence to prevent a victorious Trump from erasing the harrowing reality of that day.

That clash over how America will remember the Jan. 6 attack raged Monday even as the actual proceedings at the Capitol — in which Vice President Kamala Harris presided over a drama-free certification of Trump’s election — seemed an afterthought.

“I still believe Donald Trump was the main instigator of what happened on Jan. 6 four years ago. I think over time, history will record that exactly the way it is,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, former chair of the Jan. 6 committee, told POLITICO. “I think that effort to minimize what occurred and the fact that somehow what people saw with their own eyes really didn't happen, history will record differently.”



President Joe Biden echoed that message in a Washington Post op-ed Sunday, writing: “We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

Trump, by contrast, has spent four years trying to recast the violence of Jan. 6 as a blip in an otherwise peaceful protest of the 2020 election results, followed by a relentless political persecution of the MAGA loyalists who stormed the Capitol in his name. He has at times amplified false claims that left-wing protesters instigated the riot, that government agents had a hand in stoking the attack or that Democrats allowed the violence to spiral out of control in order to entrap Trump supporters.

Now, as he prepares to return to office, Trump is readying pardons and commutations for many of the people prosecuted for joining the Jan. 6 mob. He has called those people “political prisoners,” and granting them clemency will further entrench his revisionist version of the attack, which left 140 police officers wounded, several Trump supporters dead and — for a time — both parties united in condemnation of Trump and his role in stoking the lies that fueled the mob.

Newly empowered congressional Republicans have readily embraced Trump’s alternate history, vowing to turn their investigative energy toward the prosecutors and Democratic lawmakers (and one Republican: Liz Cheney) who investigated Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. They’ve homed in on failures of security and intelligence that enabled the pro-Trump mob to overrun police barricades and occupy the Capitol for several hours, while the Pentagon struggled to mobilize the National Guard.

And Republicans who once called for aggressive prosecutions of those who breached the Capitol have either gone silent or joined Trump in attacking the ensuing Justice Department investigation as politically motivated. They have largely stayed silent amid Trump’s vow to pardon many of those convicted for their role in the attack.

“The American people must never be allowed to forget what happened on Jan. 6, 2021,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement.

Federal judges who have presided over the criminal cases stemming from the riot have spent the two months since Trump’s electoral victory sounding the alarm about the torrent of misinformation about the attack and the signal that blanket clemency would send.

“No matter what ultimately becomes of the Capital Riots cases already concluded and still pending, the true story of what happened on January 6, 2021 will never change,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote in a recent sentencing decision.

Forgetting the visceral violence of that day — and the months-long subversion campaign by Trump that led up to it — once seemed impossible. Searing images of rioters bludgeoning cops, guns drawn on the House floor, members cowering in House galleries and then-Vice President Mike Pence fleeing for safety were part of the daily discourse in Washington. Criminal cases against the 1,583 members of the mob have aired new details about the realtime horrors faced by lawmakers and police — most of them captured on video that has been released publicly.

There was the hours-long battle in the Capitol’s lower-west terrace tunnel — the same tunnel Trump will emerge from to take the oath of office in two weeks — in which police officers held off hundreds of rioters during the most violent part of the attack. There was the moment a Proud Boy from New York smashed a Senate-wing window with a stolen police riot shield. There was the breach of the Senate chamber, with rioters occupying the dais where Pence had just stood and leaving a menacing note. There was the ransacking of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, with rioters smashing mirrors, purloining a laptop, propping feet on her desk.

But over time, as Republicans sidled ever closer to Trump — and Trump fought back against his pursuers in the Justice Department and Congress — the story has become muddier. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who once denounced Trump for “a disgraceful dereliction of duty” on Jan. 6 and suggested he could face criminal prosecution, endorsed him for reelection last year.

And following Trump’s win, House Republicans have signaled that they intend to mount an effort to investigate and punish the people who investigated Trump over his role in the attack. Speaker Mike Johnson vowed a “fully funded” investigation of the Jan. 6 committee, lashing out after Biden awarded the committee’s leaders Citizens’ Medals.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she has urged Trump and his team to blanket pardon every person charged for their involvement in the riot at the Capitol, even if they assaulted police, because of what she argues is disparate treatment for left-wing protesters who participated in violence across the country after the death of George Floyd in 2020.

“I’m thankful that the Capitol Police defended the Capitol here on January 6 but we also deserve more answers,” Greene said.


Recent