Four years ago on Jan. 6, not even most Republicans would have imagined this 2025 anniversary: The West Front of the Capitol — where rioters battled outnumbered police to breach the building, marauding and hunting for lawmakers — is currently getting gussied up for this month’s inauguration of the 2021 mob’s inciter: Donald Trump.
“All I can say is count me out, enough is enough,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham famously harrumphed in the Senate back then. He was one of many Republicans who condemned Trump for the attack after it was put down and members of Congress — along with the day’s chief target, Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence — could safely return to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Within a month, those same Republicans, cowed by Trump’s fanatically loyal voters, ate their words and returned to his fold — and, in shape-shifter Graham’s case, to his golf courses.
Ever since, the Republican Party has either downplayed the violence of Jan. 6 or, like Trump, denied that it was anything more than “great patriots” exercising their 1st Amendment rights or making “a normal tourist visit” to the Capitol, though we all watched an insurrection in real time and in countless video replays. They’ve condemned Americans to be bit players in a Marx Brothers comedy: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” But this charade isn’t funny.
Let’s mark this anniversary by recalling some facts about what happened that day and afterward, in the run-up to President Biden’s inauguration. And by calling the gaslighting, the lying, just what it is.
Lies like this: On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri told the right-wing Newsmax that those criminally charged after Jan. 6 — nearly 1,600 people, including almost 1,000 who’ve pleaded guilty, according to a Justice Department update — were entrapped by the FBI “to do things that they didn’t even know might be illegal.”
Who doesn’t know that assaulting police with iron pipes, tasers, pepper spray, bats and flagpoles, injuring more than 140 of them, contributing to the deaths of several, and doing millions of dollars of damage to federal property is illegal? And how does a political party that professes to support law enforcement come to make these absurdist arguments?
Blind fealty to, or fear of, the incoming president is how.
But the voters have spoken, and a narrow plurality chose Trump, the Jan. 6 instigator, to become president in two weeks. And his “day one” promises include pardoning those he calls “the J-6 hostages.”
“Those people have suffered long and hard,” the usually unempathetic president-elect said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. Trump first excused those who’d assaulted police — “They had no choice” — and then suggested the police actually invited the rioters into the Capitol: “You had the police saying, ‘Come on in. Come on in.’ ” (Now you know where the likes of Burlison get their nonsense.)
According to Trump, it’s the Democrats and Republicans who were on the House Jan. 6 investigatory committee — “political thugs” and “creeps” — who should be in jail. This from the former and future commander in chief who, the committee found, sat in the White House for three hours that day — “187 minutes of dereliction” — watching the mayhem on TV and drinking Diet Coke as aides, family, friends and Fox News hosts implored him to do something, say something, to stop it.
As the Jan. 6 committee’s final report concluded: “There’s no question that President Trump had the power to end the insurrection. He was not only the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military, but also of the rioters.”
Biden delivered his answer to Trump’s perverse judgment this week: He awarded the nation’s second-highest civilian honor to Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the Democratic chair and Republican vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee — Cheney for “putting the American people over party” and Thompson for “dedication to safeguarding our Constitution.” But Trump’s pliant Justice Department could get the last word, alas.
In the meantime, Biden is providing the “smooth transition” that sore-loser Trump denied him after the 2020 election. “Welcome back,” the president told Trump a week after the 2024 election at the traditional White House meeting of incoming and outgoing presidents, another norm Trump scorned in 2020 as he contested his loss in a free and fair election.
Back then, the post-Jan. 6 preparations for Biden’s inauguration had a wartime feel amid fears of a repeat attempt to prevent his taking office. Among the security measures were 7-foot fencing topped with razor wire around the Capitol, concrete barriers, boarded-up windows, barricaded roads and closed subway stations, military vehicles and 25,000 National Guard troops on the streets, with thousands more police from around the nation deputized to help.
On Inauguration Day 2021, Trump was not on the platform — one of the few presidents in U.S. history to willfully refuse to attend his successor’s swearing-in — but Pence was. On this Jan. 20, Trump will be there, of course, with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris looking on as he’s sworn in. Pence will be absent, repudiated in favor of a vice presidential pick, JD Vance, more likely than Pence proved to be to put Trump above the Constitution.
Four years ago, given the security threat and still-spreading pandemic, Biden spoke to an empty expanse; a “field of flags” stood in for crowds on the National Mall. “We learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile,” the new president said. But, he added, “At this hour, my friends, it has prevailed.”
Democracy will prevail again on this Jan. 20. To the benefit of, but no thanks to, Donald Trump.