Republican Donald Trump has launched his general election campaign not merely rewriting the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, but positioning the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.
At a weekend rally in Ohio, his first as the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee, Trump stood onstage, his hand raised in salute to the brim of his red MAGA hat, as a recorded chorus of prisoners in jail for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack sang the national anthem.
An announcer asked the crowd to please rise “for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” And people did, and sang along.
“They were unbelievable patriots,” Trump said as the recording ended.
Having previously vowed to pardon the rioters, he promised to help them “the first day we get into office.”
Initially relegated to a fringe theory on the edges of the Republican Party, the revisionist history of Jan. 6, which Trump amplified during the early days of the GOP primary campaign to rouse his most devoted voters, remains a rally centerpiece even as he must appeal more broadly to a general election audience.
In heaping praise on the rioters, Trump is shifting blame for his own role in the run-up to the bloody mob siege and asking voters to absolve hundreds of them — and himself — over the deadliest attack on a seat of American power in 200 years.
At the same time, Trump’s allies are installing 2020 election-deniers to the Republican National Committee, further institutionalizing the lies that spurred the violence. That raises red flags about next year, when Congress will again be called upon to certify the vote….
The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has put the devoted supporters charged with January 6 crimes at the heart of his campaign. He began his first major campaign rally last March firing up the Waco, Texas crowd by playing “Justice for All,” a song he helped produce with the “J6 Prison Choir.” It has since become a staple of his events. On Truth Social last week, Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next President” would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
The story of Trump’s shift — from reluctant denunciations to direct support for those charged in connection with the day’s events — offers a glimpse into the workings of his mind, and of his political operation. The change began gradually, soon after he left office and weathered impeachment proceedings. Two months after he resumed civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, the president described the crowd to two visiting Washington Post reporters as “loving,” and offered a defense of their behavior: Capitol Police had “ushered” them into the building, he said, and were “hugging and kissing” them — a view belied by video footage and widely rejected by the courts. Aides to Trump point to remarks from this period as evidence he always cared about the cause of January 6th defendants.
A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.
That path was smoothed in part by a handful of women — from the high-profile Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to lesser-known figures like Trump campaign staffer Joanna Miller Wischer and Cynthia Hughes, who founded the Patriot Freedom Project. They made the case to him that at least some of his devoted followers charged in the riot were jailed unjustly, and were being treated poorly.
Another crucial factor in Trump’s growing support for the cause may have been his own confrontation with American law enforcement, including over charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which has become a centerpiece of his campaign for president.