'A day of love': How Trump inverted the violent history of January 6

In two weeks, Donald Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the US 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 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 face down to be beaten with an American flag on a pole and another was pulled into the scrum to be kicked and stomped.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, 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 January 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Trump of responsibility for January 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 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 Trump's opponent, Joe Biden.

But with his return to office, 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.

Asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Trump accepts any responsibility for what unfolded Jan. 6, his spokesperson, 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 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 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."

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 with "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 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 departing 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 per cent 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, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., was asserting on Twitter that the events had "all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation." Hours later, 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, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., 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." (Gaetz would become President-elect Trump's first choice for attorney general before being derailed by scandal.)

According to MIT 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 Trump's family.

Trump remained mostly silent in the weeks that followed. But in a late March 2021 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 police. And those who had rallied with him beforehand were a "loving crowd."

Blaming the deep state

Through the spring and summer of 2021, Trump's Republican allies sought to sow doubt and blame others. It was as if McConnell, among other leading Republicans, had never publicly declared Trump responsible. As if the world had not seen what it had seen.

In early May 2021, on the same day House Republicans stripped Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., of her leadership role for labeling Trump a threat to democracy, they used an Oversight Committee hearing to minimize the riot. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., questioned whether all of those rioters wearing Trump gear and shouting pro-Trump chants were truly Trump supporters, while Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., 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 2021 by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, at the time perhaps the most-watched commentator in cable news: The riot had been a false-flag operation orchestrated by the FBI.

Gaetz and another Republican loyalist, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., quickly seconded the deep state conspiracy theory, while 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, Trump broke his monthslong silence about Jan. 6. At an early July rally in Sarasota, Florida, 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," Trump said. "There was no reason for it. Who shot Ashli Babbitt?"

He 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 January 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 Carlson expanded on his specious contention that the Capitol attack was a government plot to discredit 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."

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 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 center's razor-wire walls, their supporters kept vigil in a spot dubbed the "Freedom Corner." Led by Babbitt's mother, among others, they set out snacks, flew American flags and livestreamed 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 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, Arizona, he described the Jan. 6 defendants as persecuted political prisoners. Later that month, in Conroe, Texas, he promised that if he was reelected, and if pardons were required, "we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly."

Trump's counteroffensive began taking shape. The House Jan. 6 select committee, of which Cheney was vice chair, 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 Jan. 6. But subsequent investigations demonstrated that it was his own military advisers, not Pelosi, who blocked the idea, concerned with both the optics of armed soldiers at a political protest and the possibility that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to place the troops under his direct command.

"There is absolutely no way I was putting US military forces at the Capitol," the acting defense secretary, Chris 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, 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, Tennessee, 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 Carlson on Fox News and Republicans in Congress as a government plant who had stage-managed the riot.

Trump's efforts seemed to be working. By mid-2022, an NBC News poll found that fewer than half of Americans still considered Trump "solely" or "mainly" responsible for Jan. 6.

For some supporters, though, 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, New Jersey: 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. Hughes was also an aunt of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a professed Adolf Hitler fanboy who had spent time in the Patriot Wing.

They told Trump that the defendants and their families felt abandoned by him, 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 Kelly by 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, Trump donated $10,000 to Hughes' organization and told a conservative radio host that if he was elected, there would be full pardons and "an apology to many." Days later, Hughes was given a speaking role at a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Hughes' Patriot Freedom Project closed out 2022 with a fundraising 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 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 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 foreword, 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.

Trump and the prison choir

Perhaps the moment when Trump and his allies fully embraced their alternate version of history came March 3, 2023, when a new song appeared on major streaming platforms.

The song, "Justice for All," featured 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.

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 fundraising effort that Trump loyalist Kash Patel, now the president-elect's pick to head the FBI, helped produce -- concludes with a defiant echo of the "USA!" 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 Trump "and the J6 Choir."

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, 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 Biden's election.

A subsequent court filing by Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the federal investigation, cited 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."

Trump, 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, 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.

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, two months ago, helped Trump win election as the 47th president of the United States.

Promises of pardons

Once he takes office, 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, Smith dropped his election-subversion case, adhering to a Justice Department policy not to prosecute a sitting president.

An emboldened Trump has indicated that his presidential agenda will include payback for those who declared him responsible for the Capitol attack. He has said that Smith "should be thrown out of the country," and that Cheney and other leaders of the House select committee -- "one of the greatest political scams in history," his spokesperson, Leavitt, said -- should "go to jail," without providing evidence to warrant such extreme measures.

At the same time, Trump's repeated vows to pardon those implicated in the Capitol riot, an act of erasure that would validate their claims of political persecution, has 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 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 artificial intelligence 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 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. Lamberth not only rejected Grillo's request for a delay, he filed a court document to "clear the air" and "remind ourselves what really happened."

With clinical precision, Lamberth 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; and how some engaged in "pitched battle" with 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," Lamberth 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, 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, Lamberth ordered Grillo to be taken immediately into custody to begin a sentence of one year in prison.

As he was being handcuffed, the January 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.