By Philip Bump · The Washington Post (c) 2024
History will tell the story of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in direct terms. President Donald Trump, increasingly desperate to block Joe Biden’s inauguration to replace him, summoned his supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest. Hundreds of thousands came, including members of violent, fringe-right groups.
As legislators convened to formalize Biden’s victory, angry throngs of Trump supporters pushed toward the building, some engaging in violent altercations with law enforcement in an effort to stop Congress from counting electoral votes. Hundreds were injured, including more than 100 police.
Congress tried to hold Trump accountable for his role in the riot twice, first by impeaching him – enough Republican senators sided with Trump to prevent conviction – and then by launching a high-profile investigation of his broad effort to retain power. Meanwhile, the justice system went to work arresting and imprisoning those who had engaged in the riot. Special counsel Jack Smith brought federal charges against Trump.
None of this is the story Trump tells. Instead, he inverts both the culpability and the morality: The rioters are victims, and those seeking justice are guilty of injustices. It’s deeply and transparently self-serving. It’s also the position of the incoming president of the United States, someone empowered to enforce his vision of justice on the rest of the country.
Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker last week during which he outlined his upside-down view of the events of Jan. 6.
Welker asked Trump about his repeated pledges during the campaign to pardon those imprisoned for their actions during the riot. He reiterated that sweeping pardons would be one of his first acts as president.
“Those people have suffered long and hard,” he said of those who’d been sentenced to prison. He noted that there might be some exceptions – but not those accused of being members of extremist organizations or who’d engaged in the most violent actions. Instead, he mused that there might have been some “antifa” swept up in the prosecutions, resuscitating a long-debunked idea that left-wing actors were involved in the violence that day. In case there was uncertainty about the extent to which he was suggesting that the riots weren’t the fault of his supporters, he brought up Ray Epps, a man whose alleged role in fomenting the riot has been debunked repeatedly and exhaustively.
“But some of them, 169 of them, have pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers,” Welker reminded Trump.
“Because they had no choice,” he responded.
There were some people who deserved to be investigated or thrown in jail, Trump said: the members of the congressional committee that investigated the riot and the special counsel who brought charges against him.
The committee members did something “inexcusable,” Trump said, when they “went through a year and a half of testimony [and] deleted and destroyed all evidence – that they found.” The Democratic-led committee did this, he said, to protect former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who he has suggested was responsible for the police being overrun. But that never happened. Welker offered a wan “they deny doing that” in response to Trump’s claim; the reality is that the committee’s work and evidence are publicly available and this hoary claim of Trump’s has been debunked.
But Trump was insistent that their probe and Smith’s prosecutions had been “won” or “discredited” – basing those overstated assertions on two developments in his federal cases. First, a sympathetic judge tossed out his indictment for retaining classified documents, a decision that was under appeal at the time of the election. After Trump won, Smith withdrew his prosecution related to Trump’s efforts in 2020 – not because they had been discredited but because he wanted to end the prosecutions in a way that retained the possibility that they could be revived once Trump was out of office.
Trump’s complaints to Welker weren’t simply grumbles. The members of the House select committee “should go to jail” for “what they did,” he said – which, again, was putatively the destruction of evidence. Asked whether he wanted to see Smith prosecuted, Trump said that the special counsel was “very corrupt” but that he would defer such a decision to his attorney general. (He has tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi for that role, someone who has a history of bolstering Trump politically.)
Much of the rhetoric Trump offered to Welker was familiar: the same whining and the same aggression. But the context is different. This isn’t Trump at Mar-a-Lago, riffing on some random podcast. It’s the president-elect suggesting that he hopes to use his power to invert the processes of punishment applied in the wake of the riot. And to do so not because there was a broad injustice that needed correction but because there was a narrow one, a perceived injustice in which he was the sole victim.
Every element of Trump’s planned return to office is centered on cementing his own power. Those seeking positions with his administration are undergoing obvious loyalty tests, including evaluation of their views about the Capitol riot. His Cabinet nominees have often been vetted to ensure one all-important qualification: whether they (like Bondi) have demonstrated fealty to Trump.
His approach to Jan. 6 is a particularly sharp demonstration of how he plans to lead. A willingness to use his power to punish those who sought to hold him to account and to absolve those who attacked police in the effort to help him stay in power four years ago. After all, “they had no choice.”
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced Philip Grillo to a year in prison for his role in the events of Jan. 6. In doing so, Lamberth acknowledged the reality that Trump is hoping to subvert.
“Having read dozens of indictments related to Jan. 6, I can say confidently: Nobody has been prosecuted for protected First Amendment activity. Nobody is being held hostage. Nobody has been made a prisoner of conscience,” Lamberth said. “Every rioter is in the situation he or she is in because he or she broke the law, and for no other reason.” He added that “a jury of Mr. Grillo’s peers found that he broke the law when he participated in the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, and it falls to this court to hold him accountable.”
As he was being taken away, though, Grillo had a response to Lamberth – a taunt, really.
“Trump’s gonna pardon me,” he said.