As Trump readies his J6 “day one” pardons, how can we ensure history tells the truth about that day?
This week marked the fourth anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which the Justice Department considers “an act of domestic terrorism that threatened the nation’s peaceful transfer of power” during which an estimated 140 members of law enforcement were injured.
The peaceful transfer of power Donald Trump enjoyed yesterday, one that he himself had denied Joe Biden, reminded many that Trump and the GOP have largely succeeded at whitewashing the history of that terrible day.
It’s hard to believe that exactly four years ago today, on January 7, 2021, Trump posted a video on Twitter in which he called the riots a “heinous attack” and said:
“The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
Cut to 2024 when Trump regularly would call January 6 “a day of love,” referred to the rioters as “J6 hostages” and pledged to “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime – and I will sign their pardons on Day One.”
Multiple Republicans who were there and saw the violence first-hand have echoed this evolution in Trump’s storytelling about that day.
Last January for example, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) deleted her initial statement condemning the attacks as “a truly tragic day for America” from her website after Liz Cheney exposed her original take.
Unfortunately for Stefanik, the internet doesn’t forget.
And then there was Ted Cruz:
Even CNN’s top Trump apologist Scott Jennings declared in the aftermath of the attacks that Trump “violated his oath of office” on January 6.
Yet now here we are, less than two weeks from Trump’s swearing-in and his promised “day one” pardons of January 6 rioters, many of whom continue to peddle election conspiracies.
Anthony Vo is a 32-year-old Capitol rioter sentenced to 9 months in prison for his participation in the attack. He is currently seeking refuge in Canada in hopes of receiving one of those Trump pardons. He told New York Times’ The Daily podcast that his hope and expectation is that history will look back on January 6 as “the day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”
If history is written by the victors, then Donald Trump is certainly hoping his second presidential victory will re-write the entire narrative about that day into just this sort of bizarro world distortion.
In today’s piece, I’ll explore Trump’s attempt at re-writing the narrative of what happened on that deadly day and how we can work to prevent it from becoming history’s final draft.Subscribe
Trump’s looming January 6 pardons
Four years out from the attacks, we are living in Trump’s upside-down world in which the very notion of his pardoning those who sought to subvert the peaceful transfer of power by violent means has become normalized.
In light of this, it’s worth taking stock of the severity of what happened on that day.
As The Brennan Center For Justice reminds us:
According to reporting compiled by NBC’s Ryan Reilly, the January 6 defendants were captured on video brandishing and using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive Trump billboard, Trump flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches, and even an explosive device during the attack on the Capitol. More than 140 police officers were injured and members of Congress fled the building in fear for their lives.
According to ABC News, 1,583 people have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the riot. Of those, “608 have faced charges for assaulting, resisting or interfering with law enforcement,” 174 of which “were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or otherwise causing serious injury to an officer.”
PBS News also broke it down by the numbers:
- About 250 people have been convicted of crimes by a judge or a jury after a trial;
- Only two people were acquitted of all charges by judges after bench trials;
- At least 1,020 others had pleaded guilty as of Jan. 1;
- More than 1,000 rioters have already been sentenced, with over 700 receiving at least some time behind bars; and
- More than 100 Jan. 6 defendants are scheduled to stand trial in 2025, while at least 168 riot defendants are set to be sentenced this year.
Yet just 13 days before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the only question about Trump’s pardons is not whether he will issue them, but how sweeping those pardons will be.
In recent months, Team Trump has tried to lower expectations around his J6 pardons, with a spokesman telling USA Today in November that pardons would be issued on a “case-by-case basis.” Trump echoed that language last month during his Meet The Press interview, saying he would “look at individual cases,” perhaps making “some exceptions” for “radical” or “crazy” rioters.
But MAGA doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. In the wake of the Meet The Press interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) amplified a decidedly non-nuanced interpretation of his promise to pardon the rioters.
And according to Reuters, John Pierce, a defense attorney who has represented more than 50 of the January 6 rioters, puts Trump’s dilemma this way:
“I expect he will be very quick and very broad in what he does.If he does not issue essentially a blanket pardon on day 1, I think he will face a lot of backlash.”
Either way, we should certainly expect at least some pardons on January 20. As he told Time magazine, they will “start in the first hour.”
But we should not be lulled into complacency over how norm-shattering these pardons would be. As The Brennan Center puts it:
while it would not technically be an abuse of his power to do so, it would be an appalling, unprecedented violation of the trust the American people place in their leaders.
If Trump pardons January 6 rioters, he would be using the pardon power to erase an attack on Constitution and country. The purpose of that attack was his personal benefit — if it had succeeded, it could have permitted him to stay in power after losing the election, contrary to every principle of American democracy. An exercise of the pardon power along those lines would have no resemblance to what the Founding Fathers intended.
“I thought I was a good guy”
In late 2021, the first interrogation of a January 6 rioter was released. In the clip, Danny Rodriguez tearfully admits to tasing Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone. Rodriguez, who admitted to breaking a window to get into the Capitol, likened his expectations of that day to a “civil war” and says he went to DC for “the main fight, the main battle”
“because Trump called everyone there.”
In a particularly telling moment, Rodriguez elaborated on his thinking upon entering the Capitol that day:
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that we were doing the wrong thing. I thought we were doing the (expletive) right thing. I thought we were going to be — I’m so stupid. I thought I was going to be awesome. I thought I was a good guy.”
This pretty much sums up Donald Trump’s entire disinformation strategy: to completely flip who the good guys and the bad guys are. In Trump’s retelling, the rioters are “political prisoners” and it was a “day of love” akin to “a tourist visit.” In this MAGA fever dream, the government, the Democrats, and even the Capitol and Metro police on duty that day are “the bad guys” and Trump is the hero gathering his army of “good guys.” And for many on the right, his election victory in November is a vindication of this view.
It’s a brazen retelling that flies in the face of all facts. But as we know in MAGA world, Trump and right-wing media are the only sources to be believed, and these so-called “facts” from the government, law enforcement, and the media, are not to be trusted. Between Trump’s shameless lies and a right-wing media ecosystem—from Fox to X—ready and willing to amplify them, Trump has been able to convince a large swath of Americans of his preferred alternate reality of January 6.
This should hardly be surprising. Trump has been myth-making at Orwellian scale throughout his career, convincing people, for example, that he was a successful businessman despite driving multiple businesses into bankruptcy. The serial adulterer and philanderer is somehow a committed family man, a deadbeat billionaire Ivy League grad is somehow an anti-elite champion of the working class, and the most thin-skinned political figure of our time, who sues media outlets and pollsters for coverage and results he doesn’t like, is a champion of free expression.
Even the pursuit of justice and accountability for Trump’s crimes becomes “weaponization” and “corruption.”
In all of these scenarios, Trump is cast as “the good guy.” For his supporters, that goodness and righteousness rub off on them. And the Democrats, the so-called “enemy within,” are the villains who must be vanquished.
This points to the Democrats’ major failure in the era of Trump: the lack of a consistent persistent alternate narrative to the one Trump has been spinning. Whether it was the images we saw on TV that day or the results of the Jan 6 Select Committee, Democrats were largely content to let the truth speak for itself. That’s not enough when you have an entire political and media apparatus telling people that up is down and that it’s raining when the sun is out.
Undoing the “meh-ification of January 6”
The Washington Post published a piece yesterday titled The Meh-ification Of Jan 6. According to the author, the success of Trump’s gradual “retconning” of what really happened on January 6 is visible in the polling.
Polling has regularly shown Americans lean significantly against the idea of pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, generally by about 2 to 1. Very few Americans — only about one-quarter in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago — regard their sentences as “too harsh.”
But the new YouGov poll shows just 39 percent of Americans and of independents “strongly” disapprove of such pardons.
In other words, as with so many things Trump-related, the opposition has lost much of its fight and decided other things are more important. And the passage of time has again proved one of Trump’s greatest allies.
So how can Democrats fight back against the firehose of distortions that Trump has used to rewrite the narrative of that day? Wisconsin Democrats’ Chair Ben Wikler, who is also running for Chair of the DNC, posted an important X thread yesterday breaking down the key to winning back the message war not only on January 6 but on other issues as well.
As Ben makes clear, our job now as Democrats and as Americans who care about the rule of law is to ensure the truth about that day, or about any issue the right-wing seeks to distort for their own gain, does not get swept under the rug. Part of that is regaining trust with the American people by giving them a strong counter-narrative. Importantly, that means going to outlets where those Americans can actually hear that message.
And then it is on us to be relentless with the truth. The liars, as shameless as they are, cannot be allowed to get away with their retelling of reality, as, for too many Americans, the right already has.
These are important steps we can take toward undoing the damage already done by Trump and his pliant media and political echo chambers so that we can ensure that the truth ends up as the final draft of history.