‘A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of
Jan. 6
The
president-elect and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol
attack — spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom to their
ultimate political gain.
By Dan
Barry and Alan Feuer
Jan. 5, 2025Updated 1:45 p.m. ET
In
two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United
States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the
Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he
will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely
in his name.
Directly
behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed
by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol
with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons. To his left, the spot where
roaring rioters and outnumbered police officers fought hand to hand. To his
right, where the prostrate body of a dying woman was jostled in the bloody
fray.
And before him, a dozen marble steps descending to a
lectern adorned with the presidential seal. The same steps where, four years
earlier, Trump flags were waved above the frenzied crowd and wielded like
spears; where an officer was dragged facedown to be beaten with an American
flag on a pole and another was pulled into the scrum to be kicked and stomped.
Image
In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s
volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot
rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his
stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his
loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare
into a political asset.
What
began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6
gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the
attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the
government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow
became patriotic martyrs.
This
inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it
neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his
faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on
flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional
inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated
victimization.
That
day was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike
Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died
during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police
officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted
melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of
the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But with his return to office, Mr. Trump now has the
platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called
“a day of love.” He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new
administration, while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal
charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.
When
asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Mr. Trump accepts
any responsibility for what unfolded on Jan. 6, his spokeswoman, Karoline
Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the “political losers” who tried to
derail his career and asserted that “the mainstream media still refuses to
report the truth about what happened that day.” She added, “The American people
did not fall for the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th.”
The
Jan. 6 tale that Mr. Trump tells is its own kind of replacement theory, one
that covers over the marble-hard facts the way a blue carpet will cover those
tainted Capitol steps on Inauguration Day.
The Seeds of Suspicion
What
happened and why seemed beyond debate.
Hundreds
of thousands of tips. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. Thousands of
seized cellphones. The attack on the Capitol was, after all, the largest
digital crime scene in history, the total estimated cost of its aftermath
exceeding $2.7 billion.
The
Justice Department has experienced some setbacks in its criminal prosecutions —
including a Supreme Court ruling that it overreached in using a controversial
obstruction statute — but its success rate has been overwhelming. More than
half of the nearly 1,600 defendants have pleaded guilty, while 200 more have
been convicted after trial, resulting in sentences ranging from a few days in
jail for misdemeanor trespassing to 22 years in prison for seditious
conspiracy.
The story told by many of the indictments begins with a
mixed-message speech delivered before the riot by Mr. Trump in a park near the
White House. After falsely claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen, he
encouraged people to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, but
reminded them that “we fight like hell.”
Mr.
Trump retired to the White House, where he watched the televised violence and
ignored advice to tell the mob to leave. Then, after sending two tweets calling
for peaceful protest, he posted a video repeating his rigged-election falsehood
and saying: “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very
special.”
A follow-up tweet ended: “Remember this day forever!”
Condemnation
came swiftly. As shaken Republican leaders denounced him and Democrats moved to
impeach him for “incitement of insurrection,” a seemingly chastened Mr. Trump
called the riot “a heinous attack on the United States Capitol.” In those early
days, he referred to Jan. 6 as “the calamity at the Capitol” and warned that
lawbreakers “will pay.”
The
outgoing president called for national unity but declined to attend his
successor’s inauguration. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him of
incitement, but its leader, Mitch McConnell, declared him “practically and
morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — a sentiment
apparently shared by most Americans, with nearly 60 percent saying in polls that he should
never hold office again.
But
sand was already being thrown in the eyes of history.
Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative
Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of
Antifa provocation.” Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham
was telling viewers
that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled
throughout the crowd.” And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of
Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading
as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group
antifa.” (Mr. Gaetz would become President-elect Trump’s first choice for
attorney general before being derailed by scandal.)
According
to M.I.T. Technology Review,
this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours
after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican
officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.
The
former president remained mostly silent in the weeks that followed. But in a
late March interview with Washington Post reporters that was not made public
until months later, he provided an early hint of how he
would frame the Jan. 6 attack.
The
day he had previously called calamitous was now largely peaceful. The mob that
stormed the Capitol had been “ushered in” by the police. And those who had
rallied with him beforehand were a “loving crowd.”
A Deep-State Conspiracy Theory
Through
the spring and summer of 2021, Mr. Trump’s Republican allies sought to sow
doubt and blame others. It was as if Mr. McConnell, among other leading
Republicans, had never publicly declared Mr. Trump responsible. As if the world
had not seen what it had seen.
In early May, on the same day House Republicans stripped
Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of her leadership role for labeling Mr.
Trump a threat to democracy, they used an Oversight Committee hearing to
minimize the riot. Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina questioned
whether all those rioters wearing Trump gear and shouting pro-Trump chants were
truly Trump supporters, while Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia likened
much of the trespassing to a “normal tourist visit.”
This
benign interpretation of Jan. 6 gave way to a much more startling theory, posed
in mid-June by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who before his firing two
years later was among the most-watched commentators in cable news — that the
riot had been a false-flag operation orchestrated by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Mr.
Gaetz and another Republican loyalist, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of
Georgia, quickly seconded the deep-state conspiracy theory, while Mr. Gosar
entered the article on which it was based — written by Darren Beattie, a former
Trump speechwriter who had been fired for speaking at a conference beside white
supremacists — into the Congressional Record.
Soon
after, Mr. Trump broke his monthslong silence about Jan. 6. At an early July
rally in Sarasota, Fla., he invoked the name of Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump
rioter who had been fatally shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to
breach the House floor, where lawmakers and staff members had sought safety.
She was fast becoming a martyr to the cause.
“Shot, boom,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no reason for it.
Who shot Ashli Babbitt?”
Image
The former president also referred to the jailed rioters.
Floating the specter of a justice system prejudiced against conservatives, he
questioned why “so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6” when antifa and
Black Lives Matter hadn’t paid a price for the violent protests that followed
the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer
in 2020.
The
fog machine of conspiracy was turned up a few notches that fall, when the Fox
Nation streaming service released “Patriot Purge,” a three-part series in which
Mr. Carlson expanded on his specious contention that the Capitol attack was a
government plot to discredit Mr. Trump and persecute conservatives.
The
widely denounced claim was deemed so outrageous that two Fox News contributors,
Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest. In a scathing blog post, they wrote
that the program was a hodgepodge of “factual inaccuracies, half-truths,
deceptive imagery and damning omissions.”
Mr.
Carlson’s documentary, they wrote, “creates an alternative history of January
6, contradicted not just by common sense, not just by the testimony and
on-the-record statements of many participants, but by the reporting of the news
division of Fox News itself.”
Martyrs and Vigils
Amid
the conspiratorial swirl of antifa agitators and deep-state plots, a related
narrative was gaining traction: the glorification of those who had attacked the
Capitol. Instead of marauders, vandals and aggressors, they were now political
prisoners, hostages, martyrs. Patriots.
This movement’s energy radiated from a troubled detention
center in Washington where a few dozen men charged with attacking police
officers and committing other violent offenses were held. A defiant esprit de
corps developed among them in the so-called Patriot Wing, where inmates in
prison-issue orange gathered every night to sing the national anthem.
Outside
the razor-wire walls, their supporters kept vigil in a spot dubbed the “Freedom
Corner.” Led by Ms. Babbitt’s mother, among others, they set out snacks, flew
American flags and live-streamed phone conversations with inmates.
Sympathy
that might have been reserved for the injured police officers was directed
instead to those who had assaulted them. And Mr. Trump — whose Jan. 6 actions
were now being investigated by the Justice Department and a bipartisan House
select committee — emerged in 2022 as their No. 1 sympathizer.
At
a mid-January rally in Florence, Ariz., he described the Jan. 6 defendants as
persecuted political prisoners. Later that month, in Conroe, Texas, he promised
that if he was re-elected, and if pardons were required, “we will give them
pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Mr. Trump’s counteroffensive began taking shape. The House
select committee, whose members included Ms. Cheney, became in his words the
“unselect committee” and the prevailing narrative of Jan. 6 as an insurrection
“a lot of crap.”
One
of his most repeated contentions was that the Democratic House speaker, Nancy
Pelosi, had rejected his recommendation to have 10,000 soldiers present on Jan.
6. But subsequent investigations demonstrated that it was his own military
advisers, and not Ms. Pelosi, who blocked the idea, concerned with both the
optics of armed soldiers at a political protest and the possibility that Mr.
Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to place the troops under his direct
command.
“There
is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol,” the
acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, later told investigators. Doing
so, he said, could have created “the greatest constitutional crisis probably
since the Civil War.”
As
the select committee began holding hearings in early June 2022, Mr. Trump used
speeches and his social media platform, Truth Social, to clap back at the
damaging evidence and testimony. One post read: “The so-called ‘Rush on the
Capitol’ was not caused by me, it was caused by a Rigged and Stolen Election!”
In
a speech in Nashville that month, he dismissed the riot as a “simple protest”
that “got out of hand,” again floated the possibility of pardons and furthered
the false-flag theory by mentioning Ray Epps, a protester falsely portrayed by
Mr. Carlson on Fox News and Republicans in Congress as a government plant who
had stage-managed the riot.
His efforts seemed to be working. By mid-2022, an NBC News poll found
that fewer than half of Americans still considered Mr. Trump “solely” or
“mainly” responsible for Jan. 6.
For
some supporters, though, Mr. Trump was not doing enough. In the late summer, he
agreed to meet two advocates for the Jan. 6 defendants at his golf club in
Bedminster, N.J.: Julie Kelly, a conservative journalist who had written
skeptically about the Capitol attack, and Cynthia Hughes, a founder of the
Patriot Freedom Project, which supported the inmates’ families. Ms. Hughes was
also an aunt of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a professed Hitler fanboy who had spent
time in the Patriot Wing.
They
told Mr. Trump that the defendants and their families felt abandoned by him,
Ms. Kelly later recalled, and that some of the federal judges in Washington he
had appointed were among the worst in their handling of Jan. 6 cases.
These
jurists had earned the ire of people like Ms. Kelly by repeatedly rejecting
arguments that the defendants could not get fair trials in liberal Washington
or had been unduly prosecuted for their pro-Trump politics. The judges also
knocked down the contention that nonviolent rioters should not have been
charged at all, ruling that everyone in the mob, “no matter how modestly
behaved,” contributed to the chaos at the Capitol.
After his meeting with the women, Mr. Trump donated $10,000
to Ms. Hughes’s organization and told a
conservative radio host that if he was elected, there would be full
pardons and “an
apology to many.” Days later, Ms. Hughes was given a speaking role at a Trump
rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Ms.
Hughes’s Patriot Freedom Project closed out 2022 with a fund-raising
holiday party at the
Capitol Hill Hilton, in sight of the riot scene. Children received gifts,
inmates spoke to the crowd from jail and tearful family members shared their
hardships. There was also a surprise video message of encouragement from Mr.
Trump, who had recently announced his candidacy.
Then,
just before Christmas, the House select committee released its final report,
based largely on testimony from those inside Mr. Trump’s orbit. It accused him
of repeatedly lying about a stolen election and summoning the angry mob that
thwarted a peaceful transition between administrations.
In
the report’s foreword, Ms. Cheney recalled how her great-great-grandfather
answered Abraham Lincoln’s call to defend the union by joining the 21st Ohio
Volunteer Infantry. He fought for four years, she wrote, for the same essential
principle the committee was empaneled to protect: the peaceful transfer of
power.
The Candidate and the Prison Choir
Perhaps
the moment when Mr. Trump and his allies fully embraced their alternate version
of history came on March 3, 2023, when a new song appeared on major streaming
platforms.
The song, “Justice for All,” featured Mr. Trump reciting
the Pledge of Allegiance while the men of the Patriot Wing, now billing
themselves as the J6 Prison Choir, sang the national anthem. In other words, it
was a collaboration between a man seeking the Republican presidential
nomination and about 20 men charged with attacking the nerve center of the
republic.
Mr.
Trump recorded his
contribution at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, while the choir was
recorded with a phone in the Washington jail. The song — a fund-raising effort
that the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, now the president-elect’s nominee to head
the F.B.I., helped produce — concludes with a defiant echo of the “U.S.A.!”
chants that resounded during the Jan. 6 attack.
The
first Trump campaign rally for the 2024 election took place three weeks later,
in Waco, Texas, where a deadly standoff between federal agents and a religious
cult in 1993 became a far-right touchstone. Before launching into complaints
about persecution and promises of retribution, the candidate placed his hand
over his heart for the
playing of what an announcer called “the No. 1 song” on iTunes and Amazon,
featuring Mr. Trump “and the J6 Choir.”
Mr.
Trump’s version of the attack on the Capitol had firmly taken hold, at least
within his party. A YouGov poll at
the time found that most Republicans believed the events of Jan. 6 reflected
“legitimate political discourse.”
In
August 2023, Mr. Trump was indicted twice on charges of interfering with the
2020 election results: at the state level, for illegally seeking to overturn
the results of the election in Georgia, which he had narrowly lost; and at the
federal level, for conspiring to impede the Jan. 6 certification of Mr. Biden’s
election.
A subsequent court filing by Jack
Smith, the special counsel leading the federal investigation, cited Mr. Trump’s
steadfast endorsement of the rioters and of the prison choir, “many of whose
criminal history and/or crimes on January 6 were so violent that their pretrial
release would pose a danger to the public.” The former president, it continued,
“has financially supported and celebrated these offenders — many of whom
assaulted law enforcement on January 6 — by promoting and playing their
recording of the national anthem at political rallies and calling them
‘hostages.’”
All true. Still, Mr. Trump continued to play “Justice for
All” at rallies and at Mar-a-Lago, spread his rigged-election lie, drop
intimations of false-flag conspiracies, refer to those who stormed the Capitol
as patriots — and, now, transformed the indictments into further fuel for his
persecution narrative.
Image
Mr. Trump stood while “Justice for All,” a recording that features his
own voice and a choir of jailed rioters, played at a campaign rally in Waco,
Texas.
In
so many ways, Jan. 6 had become part of his brand — a brand in which an attack
on the symbol of American democracy became a defense of that same democracy: a
blow against political thugs and closet communists, deep-state plots and an
unjust justice system.
A
part of the brand that, in November, helped Mr. Trump win election as the 47th
president of the United States.
Promising Pardons — and Payback
Once he takes office, Mr. Trump will be positioned to
finish refashioning Jan. 6 as a modern Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
With
the help of Republican loyalists, the Senate acquitted him of incitement at his
impeachment trial. The Supreme Court he had helped mold rejected an attempt to
keep him off the ballot under a constitutional ban against insurrectionists
from holding office. And his legal maneuvering — to delay, delay, delay —
succeeded: In the days after the election, Mr. Smith, the special counsel,
dropped his election-subversion case, adhering to a Justice Department policy
not to prosecute a sitting president.
An
emboldened Mr. Trump has already indicated that his presidential agenda will
include payback for those who declared him responsible for the Capitol attack.
He has said that Mr. Smith “should be thrown out of the country,” and that Ms.
Cheney and other leaders of the House select committee — “one of the greatest
political scams in history,” his spokeswoman, Ms. Leavitt, said — should “go to
jail,” without providing evidence to warrant such extreme measures.
At
the same time, Mr. Trump’s repeated vows to pardon those implicated in the
Capitol riot, an act of erasure that would validate their claims of political
persecution, have electrified the Jan. 6 community of families, defendants and
felons. On election night, those keeping vigil outside the Washington jail
celebrated with champagne.
Even
though Mr. Trump has not specified whom he would pardon, many Jan. 6
participants are anticipating a general amnesty for everyone involved. One
defendant, charged with attacking police officers with a baseball bat, even
promoted an A.I. video of
inmates in orange jumpsuits parading triumphantly out of jailhouse doors.
Many defendants have requested delays in their court
proceedings because, they say, the imminent pardons will render their cases
moot. Among those employing this argument was Philip Sean Grillo, convicted of
several misdemeanors after entering the Capitol through a broken window and
later boasting in a recording that “we stormed the Capitol. We shut it down! We
did it!”
But to Mr. Grillo’s misfortune, the federal judge handling
his case was Royce C. Lamberth, 81, a no-nonsense former prosecutor who had
been appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Judge Lamberth not only
rejected Mr. Grillo’s request for a delay, he filed a court document to “clear
the air” and “remind ourselves what really happened.”
With
clinical precision, the judge recalled how an angry mob invaded and occupied
the Capitol with intentions to “thwart the peaceful transfer of power that is
the centerpiece of our Constitution and the cornerstone of our republican
legacy”; how they ignored directives to turn back and desist; how some engaged
in “pitched battle” with the police, “stampeding through and over the
officers.”
“They
told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence has
ever emerged,” the judge wrote. “They told the world that they were there to
put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying,
and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites. Most disturbingly, they told
the world that particular elected officials who were present at the Capitol
that day had to be removed, hurt, or even killed.”
The country came “perilously close” to letting the orderly
transfer of power slip away, Judge Lamberth wrote. He knew this, he said,
because he and his colleagues had presided over hundreds of trials, read
hundreds of guilty pleas, heard from hundreds of law enforcement witnesses —
“and viewed thousands of hours of video footage attesting to the bedlam.”
With
that, Judge Lamberth ordered Mr. Grillo to be taken immediately into custody to
begin a sentence of one year in prison.
As
he was being handcuffed, the Jan. 6 rioter taunted the veteran judge by saying it didn’t
matter: He would be pardoned anyway — by a man who will soon benefit from the
peaceful transfer of power while standing on a blue carpet covering an old
crime scene.
