When the moderator asked Donald Trump at the January 6, 2021 presidential debate, the former president immediately slipped into the familiar revisionist history of the attack on the US Capitol.
He falsely claimed he had nothing to do with the assault, blaming it on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the police officers who guarded the building that day against a mob of her supporters.
But then Trump made a brief but telling remark: He used the pronoun “we” to describe some of the rioters, grammatically placing himself among those blamed for the Capitol attack.
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“We didn’t —” Trump began to say before starting again, “This group of people who have been treated so badly.”
It was a fleeting moment, but one that captured Trump’s reluctance to walk away from the latest explosive act of his presidency, even in a general election where it offers little political upside.
Over the years, Trump has helped craft an alternate history of the day, in which the violent attack was a “love fest,” the jailed rioters were “hostages,” and their prosecution was part of a larger story of persecution — by both. Trump and his supporters – this has been at the heart of his argument for returning to the presidency.
But as he woos voters outside his loyal base ahead of November’s election, he and his campaign have engaged in an awkward push and pull back on how closely they can relate to the riot’s legacy. The recording of the jailed January 6 accused singing the national anthem no longer plays at his rallies. When some of the defendants, including a man federal prosecutors have called a “white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer,” gathered at Trump’s Bedminster Golf Club for a fundraiser, the former president, who has attended similar events, sent his support via video message instead. .
“Our hearts go out to you,” Trump said in the video. “Our souls are with you.”
The former president’s close-but-not-too-close relationship with the Jan. 6 issue is a tacit acknowledgment of his personal attachment to a cause with questionable political interests and the country’s stark partisan divide over the Capitol riot. Of Trump’s own doing.
“They’ve made a conscious effort to turn away from Jan. 6” before the general election, said Joseph McBride, an attorney who has represented several of the Jan. 6 defendants in their criminal cases. “But I don’t know how he harmonizes the two positions.”
Rewriting
The January 6 rewrite began with a collection of right-wing politicians, news media figures, activists and influencers in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack, with Trump himself largely out of the spotlight. But when he returned to politics in mid-2022, the former president latched onto the narrative, eventually weaving it into his presidential campaign as a foundation-builder.
Trump has since maintained that he did nothing wrong that day, noting that he told supporters gathered before the riot to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” and that those who came to the Capitol were only peaceful protesters.
Mostly, he has condemned the January 6 treatment of defendants who are in jail awaiting trial or serving prison terms, many of them for beatings by police. He has regularly described them as “hostages” and “political prisoners” and sometimes as “warriors” who have been unfairly judged more harshly than left-wing activists who participated in protests and riots in cities such as Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon. , in 2020.
But federal judges, including some appointed by Trump, have repeatedly rejected that argument, noting that there were clear differences between even the most violent upheavals of 2020 and the disruption of the democratic process at the Capitol.
“The conduct of the Portland rioters, while obviously serious, did not comply with the constitutionally mandated procedure established to ensure a peaceful transfer of power,” wrote Carl J. Nichols, a Trump-appointed federal judge in the District of Columbia.
Trump has argued that the indictments of the rioters and his indictment by special counsel Jack Smith are part of a broader conspiracy by the Biden administration and the larger “deep state”: an attempt to silence questions about the 2020 election and preemptively shut him down. takes office again in 2025.
It’s a rhetorical move that encourages supporters to see themselves as partners in persecuting Trump. And, legal experts worry, it has laid the ideological ground for Trump to feel validated in using the Justice Department against his enemies should he retake the White House.
“If he can convince people of the lie that our legitimate institutions of government were used in corrupt ways to persecute him, he can convince people that he has the right to turn those same institutions back on those he claims are responsible,” said Ian Bassin. , executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for legal protections against authoritarianism.
Back in June, Trump called on the Biden administration to “release the hostages” and promised to pardon them if elected. “The moment we win, we will quickly review the cases of every political prisoner wrongfully victimized by the Harris administration, and I will sign their pardons on day one,” he wrote on social media this month.
“President Trump remains committed to ensuring that all Americans have equal rights when he returns to the White House,” said campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
A political hoax
In the days immediately following the riot, even many Republicans assumed that the violence and destruction would be disastrous for Trump and his political future.
But thanks in large part to Trump’s misrepresentation of the event, that hasn’t happened.
Public opinion about Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in it has been divided along party lines since the riot, and has changed little over time. Even the televised House committee hearings on Jan. 6, which drew as many as 20 million viewers, had little effect on Americans’ views of the episode, according to a Monmouth University poll at the time.
A CBS News/YouGov poll this year found that Republicans widely support pardoning the rioters, though most also disapprove of their actions at the Capitol.
But most importantly, Republican voters have told pollsters they don’t want to talk about the episode. Another CBS News/YouGov poll conducted at the start of the Republican primaries last year found that a large majority of likely Republican primary voters — 60% — wanted a presidential candidate who would not comment on Jan. 6 at all, rather than support or criticize. rioters.
“Jan. 6 is something that excites the base, which is why they’re all bringing it up,” Julie Kelly, a journalist and activist who has long supported the defendants and their families, said of Republican politicians. “But at the end of the day, nobody wants to come off too strong these people.”
Independents, like Democrats, are much more likely to view the actions of the Jan. 6 participants as serious and their legal consequences justified. But efforts by President Joe Biden’s campaign to focus the race on Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy, including on Jan. 6, did little to turn voters against the former president. Vice President Kamala Harris has spent less time on this line of attack.
Uncomfortable allies
The staunchest supporters of the accused of January 6 are still a small but tenacious constituency in the extreme right. They regularly hold officers outside the Washington DC jail, where some of the rioters are still awaiting trial; sporadic demonstrations outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York; and panel events and fundraisers elsewhere.
They have a handful of dedicated champions in Republican politics who continue to make their case — most notably Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who hosted a hearing on the issue in Washington last week.
Trump also actively held this constituency during the primaries. Last year, on January 6, he invited family members of the defendants to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, and hosted an event for them at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. He opened his first rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas, in March 2023 with “And Justice for All”: a recording of the January 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the jail phone line as Trump delivered the pledge. of Allegiance, produced by operatives close to his campaign.
“You see the spirit of the hostages,” he said after replaying the recording in Dayton, Ohio, in March. “They have been treated terribly and very unfairly and you know it and everyone knows it. And we’re going to work on it.”
But Trump has significantly, if subtly, toned down such displays in the general election. He has dropped “And Justice for All” from his usual campaign agenda, and the defendants appeared less often in speeches this summer than last winter and spring.
In June, the Patriot Freedom Fund, a prominent Jan. 6 legal defense group, held an event at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster featuring speeches from Jan. 6 defendants, including Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a convicted rioter who is known. wears a Hitler mustache and has posted anti-Semitic statements on social media. Trump sent a video message to the group but did not attend in person.
Two months later, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Council hosted another event in Bedminster, again featuring Hale-Cusanelli and other January 6 rioters and activists. Trump, who was at a news conference that day, did not meet them.
Eventually, his staff kicked the Jan. 6 attendees out of the room to make way for Trump’s inflation presentation.
Campaign staff said that in both cases the groups had paid to rent the Bedminster event space and that Trump was unaware of Hale-Cusanell’s involvement when he made the video for the June event.
Campaign spokesman Leavitt said of Hale-Cusanell’s views: “President Trump condemns all forms of hate and bigotry and does not agree with these statements.”
At the Republican National Convention in July, January 6th was mentioned by only one speaker: former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who was released that morning after serving four months in prison for refusing to submit to a subpoena from the House January 6th Committee.
Attorney McBride said before the convention that he contacted a group of people he described as “one phone call away” from Trump, hoping to get the former president to get a speaker at the convention who could talk about Trump. the plight of the rioters.
But that didn’t happen, McBride said, largely because Trump campaign advisers didn’t want to focus too much on the Capitol attack at the event.
“Jan. 6 has always been an issue that the more experienced people in the Trump campaign have been the gatekeepers,” he said. “And they don’t want to draw more attention to it.”
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