How Trump Re-Wrote the History of January 6
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This Monday marked four years since a violent mob of Trump supporters attempted to stop certification of the 2020 election.

Shortly after January 6, 2021, 51% of respondents told CBS and YouGov that they strongly disapproved of those who forced their way into the Capitol. As of last month, that number has dropped down to 30%, nearly 20 points down. The same poll found that 72% of Republicans now support pardons for the rioters.

The softening and even celebration of that day comes after a sustained effort from Donald Trump and his allies. Countless truth social posts, interviews, and campaign rallies aimed at distorting and rewriting the past. Dan Barry is a senior writer at the New York Times and co-author of the recent article, A Day of Love, How Trump Inverted the Violent History of January 6th.

Barry said while reflecting on a second Trump inauguration how he pictured not just a return to the White House, but a reemergence of the 45th president at the Capitol itself, where so much violence happened in his name four years ago. When he comes down the steps, he'll be walking down a blue carpet that struck me as carpet that will now be covering over a crime scene.

And I think the ghosts of January 6th will be all around him. And I find that quite evocative and a reminder of how perilously close we came to this orderly transfer being disrupted. So let's walk through how we got here.

Four years ago, we saw Trump give a speech near the White House. After repeating the lie that the election had been stolen, he told the crowd to, quote, peacefully and patriotically march to the Capitol, but added, quote, we fight like hell. And we all remember what happened next. We have a breach of the Capitol! Breach of the Capitol! Hey, Mike Pence! Hey, Mike Pence! Hey, Mike Pence! Hey, Mike Pence! Hey, Mike Pence!

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

Trump was at the White House as the chaos unfolded, and save for a couple tweets calling for peaceful protest, did little to stop the riot that was unfolding on TV. Some hours later, he posted a minute-long video on Twitter that had, let's say, mixed signals. I know you're pained. I know you're hurt.

We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. Tell me about the initial reaction to the rioting on January 6th and Trump's behavior that day.

Sure. I think that the outrage was immediate and it was happening both publicly and privately. Trump's aides and even his family members were begging him to tell the rioters to go home. And it took a long time for him to finally say something.

Then the condemnation was taking place as well. Republican leaders, both public and private, were denouncing him. All the social media platforms were cutting him off. There were cabinet resignations. His own cabinet members were resigning. Here's what conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said on January 7th, 2021, the day after. Frankly, I think that in many ways, it's the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since 9-11.

It's it's it was cataclysmically awful. Here's Fox News host Sean Hannity. We do not support those that commit acts of violence. And all of today's perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But among those hedging early on was Fox News host Jesse Waters. In context,

What happened yesterday doesn't really hold a candle to what we saw over the summer with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. While the riot was winding down or was being controlled by the heroic law enforcement on scene,

It was already being planted by Paul Gosar, among others, that, no, this was Antifa. The idea that it was some kind of a plot or that it was somebody else. And that night, Laura Ingraham on Fox News was propagating the same falsehood. She was basically arguing, some of these rioters don't look like MAGA supporters because they're wearing dark helmets or something. So, therefore, they must be somebody else? Yeah.

I guess that's what she was implying, and that would suggest that all Trump supporters always wear MAGA gear. They always wear the exact same uniform. So you know exactly what team you're on. But I don't want to downplay the jaw-dropping outrage that many Republicans were feeling at that time. They absolutely were. It's what happened in the aftermath and the months to follow where that outrage somehow evaporated.

You mentioned some of the Republican lawmakers and commentators who were attempting to soften the day.

Among those quickly trying to change the narrative was Donald Trump himself, who in March of 2021, when doing an interview with The Washington Post's Carol Lennig and Philip Rucker, said that, quote, the rioters were ushered in by the police and that those who had rallied with him beforehand were, quote, a loving crowd.

Right. What he's describing makes it sound like the people who descended upon the Capitol were there for some kind of theater production and the Capitol officers just had like flashlights and were directing them to their seats. But of course, this would be a kind of foreshadowing for one of the conspiracy theories about January 6th that would take hold. Yeah.

You found that one of Trump's most repeated stories was that the Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had rejected his recommendation to have some 10,000 soldiers present on January 6th.

I think what Trump was implying there, and it's all part of the larger conspiracy that sometimes is overt and sometimes is winked at, that this was all purposeful by other people and that Nancy Pelosi had control over the National Guard somehow. I think Trump's argument is that he recommended that maybe we should have 10,000 troops there

And it was in fact his own defense department, his own Pentagon, who pushed back against that and said, no, first of all, that would be a horrible optic to have protesters at the Capitol and then have them surrounded by soldiers. That's not a good look. And secondly, that defense department official said, you know, who knows, maybe he was going to employ the Insurrection Act, which would put those troops under his direct command. And that also would not be a good look.

So ultimately, it was his own administration that was responsible for not bringing in the soldiers. It wasn't evidence of really anything. That's exactly right. In late 2021, Tucker Carlson, who was still then a host at Fox News, put out a three-part series called Patriot Purge, exploring his claim that the insurrection was a government plot to discredit Donald Trump and to entrap, you know, well-meaning patriots.

The domestic war on terror is here, is coming after half of the country. The helicopters have left Afghanistan and now they've landed here at home. And the left is hunting the right. It was a celebration of outlandish conspiracies, audacious in its tiptoeing past fact.

And it was so roundly denounced by the media, including colleagues at Fox News, that two of those Fox colleagues resigned in protest. They were commentators who said this is just half-baked nonsense and it's feeding into the notion of a shadow government, a deep state government that simply isn't true.

And the two commentators, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, who resigned in protest, said that it ran counter to much of the news reporting that Fox News itself had done on January 6th. That's right. And I think Brett Baier and others at Fox News were doing their own kind of

counter-reporting to downplay or to challenge what Tucker Carlson had put out with Patriot Purge. In the months following the release of Patriot Purge,

many Americans tuned into what was probably the most comprehensive public detailing of evidence and testimony about January 6th, the U.S. House Select Committee hearings, which were televised in late 2021 and 2022. Tell me a little bit about how Donald Trump and his allies attempted to sort of counter-program what was a pretty compelling case that January 6th was really as bad as it seemed it was.

Trump's Republican allies in Congress tried to impeach the mission of that committee by refusing to participate. If you remember, Kevin McCarthy pretty much banned all Republican members from joining that committee. And so two wound up sitting on that committee, making it a bipartisan committee, and that was Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. And of course, they are perceived as traitors.

So even from the get-go, there's a fog surrounding it. Then as its information is coming out in witness testimony and documents and video, Trump and his allies are doing all they can to knock down or ridicule or denounce

every detail. And Trump has now turned it into something. At one point, he tweeted something to the effect of this so-called rush on the Capitol was not caused by me. It was caused by a rigged and stolen election. In other words, that all of this is corrupted by the fact that it stems from an election that was rigged and stolen to begin with.

This is the part which I always have trouble keeping straight, because if he's saying that the event was justified but not his responsibility, that complicates the narrative that it was instigated by the government or something, right? You know, once you're engaging in conspiracy theories, it's pretty hard to keep track of all the dots you've thrown up in the air. You mentioned Ashley Babbitt, the woman who was shot as she was attempting to enter into the House chamber.

She was climbing through a window that was leading into the speaker's lobby that was leading into the House chambers where some congressional members and staff members were basically hiding. Babbitt was subsequently turned into a martyr by the right-wing media and eventually by Donald Trump himself. But as you write about in your piece,

Some conservative activists and members of the media didn't feel that he was doing enough to

to advocate on behalf of the thousands of people who were arrested in the wake of January 6th. And you point to this really fascinating meeting in the summer of 2022 between Donald Trump and two conservative women, a writer named Julie Kelly and Cynthia Hughes, a founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, who

an organization that supports January 6th defendants and inmates. The three of them spoke at Trump's Bedminster Golf Club. Tell me about that meeting and how you think it changed some of Donald Trump's rhetoric.

It's an important moment because he is beginning to fully commit to the notion that the rioters and those who are now imprisoned as a result of that attack on the Capitol are martyrs and they're being persecuted. Well, they're martyrs for what cause? They're being persecuted for what cause? The cause is their belief in the falsehoods.

hood that he has propagated, that the election was stolen. So he has to commit to them in some way. They're suffering because of him. And I'm sure he's thinking about the optics of that. Like, are you going to allow people who are in prison because of you to stay there or you're not going to champion their cause?

And so in the summer of 2022, these two women visit him at Bedminster and they tell him, you know, you're not doing enough. The judges that you appointed to the bench, the federal judges who are sitting, say, in Washington, are being unduly harsh in how they're handling these cases. And you're not speaking up enough. And after that meeting, Donald Trump donated $10,000 to Ms. Hughes's cause and

And then a few days later, Ms. Hughes was given a spot at one of Trump's rallies in Pennsylvania where she laid out her cause. So now Donald Trump is not just talking about it. He's putting up some money and he is also giving them a platform to further their cause, which is that the rioters who are imprisoned are being mistreated and are unjustly being punished. Which is interesting because I've seen many reports that suggest that

some share of sentences given to defendants from the insurrection were often kind of lighter than what prosecutors had recommended or, you know, below federal sentencing guidelines. It was, you know, essentially the largest criminal investigation in American history. But it's not like every one of these defendants had the book thrown at them, right?

No, no. Oftentimes the judge would hear the prosecution's case for harsh punishment, hear the defense's case for leniency, and find some kind of middle ground. That is usually what had happened.

What's interesting, too, is it was only a year and a half earlier that Donald Trump and other Republicans were saying that, you know, people who broke the law need to pay the price. And now they're they are kind of backing away from that. And you note in your piece that in 2022, an NBC poll found that fewer than half of Americans still considered Donald Trump, quote, solely or mainly responsible for January 6th.

The polling immediately after January 6th is basically holding Donald Trump responsible or certainly accountable for what had occurred. And then as the months go by and these falsehoods are being propagated and anything that is coming out that is basically proving or, let's say, underscoring what you saw with your own eyes when the melee was occurring,

It's now being cast in this kind of cloud of smoke, and that smoke is having an effect. And as the months go by, the numbers of people who hold Trump responsible is declining. And then in early 2023, Donald Trump, now a presidential candidate again,

fully embraced his alternate telling of the day with a song, with a very strange song. Yes. So in early March of 2023, Donald Trump releases a single that appears on all the platforms. And it's kind of a duet in a way. It's Donald Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One nation, under God, united.

while a group called the J6 Prison Choir sings the national anthem. He's recorded his part in this single at Mar-a-Lago. The prisoners have used a cell phone to record it because they are in prison. It's called "Justice for All." What's so striking about it is that you have a man who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination

And he is collaborating with about 20 men who are in prison for allegedly attacking the nerve center of the republic and assaulting police officers. Now, I've covered politics for a long time. I've never seen that on someone's political playbook. But Donald Trump does it, and it goes right to the top of the charts. And when he speaks about it at his various rallies, and it's often played at his rallies, and it's often played at Mar-a-Lago,

he always makes a point of saying how high it was on the charts, that it was higher than something by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. So the song comes out in March of 2023, and by August, Donald Trump is indicted both in state and federal courts for effectively interfering with the 2020 election results, right? And that recording, Justice for All,

strikes Jack Smith, the special counsel who is working for the Department of Justice, as particularly egregious. And he files a document with the court pointing it out, saying, are you kidding me? What he's doing is financially supporting and celebrating these people who assaulted law enforcement on January 6th.

And not only that, he's playing the recordings of the national anthem at political rallies and calling them hostages, hostages, martyrs, and ultimately patriots.

He wasn't using it to raise money, though, right? No, I think what he's doing is he's subverting what the notion of patriotism is. OK, the people who attacked the Capitol are now being likened to Lexington and to the American Revolution of 1776. And if that's true, then Donald Trump is the number one patriot.

It's not so surprising to hear Trump's distortions and lies recounted in this way. I mean, we've just encountered so many of them now over the years. What's still harder for me to wrap my mind around is why so many people are willing to believe these false narratives about a day that we all witnessed. I mean, we just saw it. And that's a great question. I think that many of his supporters do, in fact, believe

believe his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. All right. And so if you believe that the election was stolen, notwithstanding that there's absolutely no evidence of this, notwithstanding the fact that it's been knocked down dozens of times in court,

If you believe that the election is stolen and rigged, that's worth revolting against. That is something that justifies going to the Capitol and making your feelings known. And if it gets violent, so be it. You're trying to

prevent what you believe is a corruption of the American ideal. So if you believe all that, and maybe you didn't in the beginning, but when your leader tells you over and over and over and over again that it was a rigged election, that these are all political enemies, that everything is a lie, that you can't trust the court system, you can't trust your federal government,

that I think this begins to find purchase. And also, you have aligned yourself with this guy for so long that what would that mean? What would that say about you if you suddenly change your mind? Now, you two are treasonous. You're a traitor. You're going against the cause. I often think that Donald Trump is the symptom of something larger. And I think that's what your question is getting at.

He's a symptom of something larger. And the acceptance of January 6th by a lot of people speaks to something larger as well. What you just said reminded me of something I read today in The Atlantic in a piece by Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield, who wrote this, quote, "...misinformation is powerful not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary."

What I take from that is that these types of conspiracy theories give people the psychological comfort of not having to change their worldview as it becomes less and less aligned with what they feel.

feel to be true around them. Right. It provides the justification. Yes. No matter that there's no evidence. Exactly. Of course, we're speaking less than a few weeks before the new administration is set to take office. Tell me where we are now. Obviously, Trump has floated the idea of pardoning the people charged and convicted for crimes on January 6th.

But you don't think it will be quite as simple as he's made it out to be? No, I don't. He has said that there will be pardons in the first hour of his administration. But he hasn't really been clear about how many people he will pardon or who.

And so I think if he were to pardon people who were convicted of mostly nonviolent misdemeanor crimes, you know, they wandered on to the restricted area or they were in the Capitol and they took a selfie and then left. That's a fairly easy lift. You may not agree with it, but that would be an easy lift.

It gets dicier for Donald Trump when it comes to the people who were filmed beating police officers with American flags or clubs or spraying them with bear spray or dragging police officers literally by their feet down the very steps near the lectern where he will be taking the oath of office in a few days. And if he does not pardon those people,

then there's going to be a segment of the Maga universe that is going to feel that he has betrayed them. He has let them down because these were the people who suffered the most in his name. So,

I'm trying to think of a good place to end this. Well, you know, I would I would Mike you might at some point I I don't know What to do but no tell me what to do. No, no, no, but you know, so a month or so ago a Relatively minor figure in the attack on the Capitol is supposed to be sentenced He was convicted of a few misdemeanors and he had petitioned the judge

to delay the sentencing because, look, Trump is going to be pardoning a lot of people and maybe this will just be busy work if you sentence me. So the judge, who is in his 80s and he was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987,

His name is Royce Lamberth. Took the unusual step of filing a note on sentencing. It's a 13-page document that he filed in this relatively minor case. And what he does is he says, OK, I want to clear the air. OK, there was no evidence of a stolen or rigged election. None.

And let's remember, angry people who believed that the election had been stolen invaded the Capitol and their purpose was to halt the peaceful transfer of power, which is what he said was the center of our Constitution and the cornerstone of our Republican legacy.

And he goes on to lay out exactly what happened. And he said, you know how I know this stuff? And you know how my colleagues on the bench know this stuff? Because we sat through hundreds and hundreds of hours of testimony today.

We went through thousands of documents and we saw thousands and thousands of hours of videotape. That is what happened. And then he sentenced that guy to a year in jail. And he sentenced him to be committed immediately because I think he wanted the guy to spend at least some time in prison before he was possibly pardoned. And then as the guy is being cuffed and being led away by the marshals, he tells the judge, it doesn't matter anyway.

Trump's going to pardon me. Why did you choose to end your piece with this anecdote? Because I thought it was beautiful what Judge Lamberth had written. I thought what he had done was Alan Foyer, who wrote the story with me, and I agreed that this was a clarifying moment that we're not nuts.

Do you know what I mean? That we saw what we saw. It's been four years, but those images are burned in my mind and they're burned in the collective mind of America. And so this octogenarian judge who was appointed by a Republican 35 years ago says, time out. Wait, this is what happened. All this stuff that's going on now, it's nonsense. This is what happened. Dan, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Dan Barry is a senior writer at The New York Times and co-author of the recent article, A Day of Love, How Trump Inverted the Violent History of January 6th. Thanks for listening to the OTM Podcast Extra. Tune into the big show this weekend. We're looking at the latest threats to defund public radio.

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