When a moderator asked Donald Trump about Jan. 6, 2021, at the presidential debate, the former president slipped immediately into a now-familiar revisionist history of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
He falsely claimed that he had nothing to do with the assault, blaming it on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the police officers who protected the building that day against a mob of his supporters.
But then Trump made a brief but telling remark: He used the pronoun “we” to describe some of the rioters, grammatically placing himself among those who have been charged with storming into the Capitol.
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“We didn’t do — ” Trump started to say before he began again, “This group of people that have been treated so badly.”
It was a fleeting moment, but one that captured Trump’s reluctance to part ways with the final explosive act of his presidency, even in a general election in which it offers little political upside.
For years, Trump has helped craft an alternate history of that day, one in which the violent attack was a “love fest,” the jailed rioters were “hostages,” and their prosecution was a part of a larger story of persecution — of both Trump and his supporters — that has been at the core of his argument for a return to the presidency.
But as he courts voters beyond his loyal base before the November election, he and his campaign have engaged in an awkward push and pull over how closely to associate with the riot’s legacy. A recording of jailed Jan. 6 defendants singing the national anthem no longer plays at his rallies. When some defendants, including a man whom federal prosecutors have described as a “white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer,” gathered at Trump’s Bedminster golf club for a fundraiser, the former president, who has attended similar events, sent his support in a video message instead.
“Our hearts are with you,” Trump said in the video. “Our soul is with you.”
The former president’s close-but-not-too-close relationship with the Jan. 6 cause is a tacit acknowledgment of his personal attachment to an issue with questionable political benefits, and of the country’s stark partisan divide over the Capitol riot, a divide largely of Trump’s own making.
“They have made a conscious effort to pivot away from Jan. 6” before the general election, said Joseph McBride, a lawyer who has represented several Jan. 6 defendants in their criminal cases. “But I don’t know how he harmonizes those two positions.”
The Rewrite
The rewriting of Jan. 6 began with a collection of right-wing politicians, news media figures, activists and influencers immediately after the Capitol attack, when Trump himself was largely out of the spotlight. But as he returned to politics in the 2022 midterms, the former president seized on the narrative, and he eventually wove it into his presidential campaign as a base-building note.
Since then, Trump has maintained that he did nothing wrong that day, pointing out that he told supporters who rallied before the riot to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” and that those who entered the Capitol were merely peaceful demonstrators.
Most frequently, he has denounced the treatment of the Jan. 6 defendants who are in jail awaiting trial or serving prison sentences, many of them for assaulting police officers. He has regularly described them as “hostages” and “political prisoners,” and occasionally as “warriors,” who have been unfairly prosecuted more severely than the left-wing activists who took part in protests and riots in cities like Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon, in 2020.
But federal judges, including some appointed by Trump, have repeatedly rejected that argument, pointing out that there were clear differences between even the most violent 2020 upheavals and the disruption of the democratic process that took place at the Capitol.
“The Portland rioters’ conduct, while obviously serious, did not target a proceeding prescribed by the Constitution and established to ensure a peaceful transition of power,” wrote Carl J. Nichols, a Trump-appointed federal judge in the District of Columbia.
Trump has claimed that the rioters’ prosecutions and his own, by special counsel Jack Smith, are part of a vast conspiracy by the Biden administration and the larger “deep state”: an effort to silence questions about the 2020 election and to disqualify him preemptively from taking office again in 2025.
It is a rhetorical move that encourages supporters to see themselves as partners in Trump’s persecution. And, legal experts worry, it has laid the ideological groundwork for Trump to feel validated in using the Justice Department against his enemies should he retake the White House.
“If he can convince people of the lie that our legitimate government institutions were all wielded in corrupt ways to persecute him, he can convince people that he’s justified in turning those same institutions back on those he claims are responsible for that,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that advocates legal protections against authoritarianism.
As recently as June, Trump called on the Biden administration to “release the hostages” and promised to pardon them if elected. “The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime, and I will sign their pardons on Day One,” he wrote on social media this month.
“President Trump remains committed to ensuring there is equal justice for all Americans when he returns to the White House,” said a campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.
A Political Sleight of Hand
In the days immediately after the riot, even many Republicans assumed that the violence and destruction would be devastating for Trump and his political future.
But thanks in large part to Trump’s false recasting of the event, that has not been the case.
Public opinion of Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in it has been split along partisan lines since the riot and has shifted little over time. Even the televised hearings of the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee, which drew an audience of as many as 20 million viewers, had almost no impact on Americans’ views on the episode, according to a Monmouth University poll taken at the time.
A CBS News/YouGov poll taken this year found Republicans to be broadly supportive of pardoning the rioters, although most also disapproved of their actions at the Capitol.
But, importantly, Republican voters have told pollsters that they would prefer not to talk about the episode. Another CBS News/YouGov poll taken early in the Republican primary contest last year found that a large majority of likely Republican primary voters — 60% — wanted a presidential candidate who would not comment on Jan. 6 at all, rather than either supporting or criticizing the rioters.
“Jan. 6 is an issue that excites the base, which is why they all keep bringing it up,” Julie Kelly, a journalist and activist who has long supported the defendants and their families, said of Republican politicians. “But in the end, no one wants to come on too strong supporting these people.”
Independents, like Democrats, are far more likely to view the Jan. 6 participants’ actions as serious and their legal consequences as justified. But efforts by President Joe Biden’s campaign to center the race on Trump’s attempts to subvert democracy, including on Jan. 6, did little to turn voters against the former president. Vice President Kamala Harris has spent less time on that line of attack.
Inconvenient Allies
The most die-hard supporters of the Jan. 6 defendants remain a small but persistent constituency on the far right. They hold regular vigils outside the Washington, D.C., jail where some of the rioters are still awaiting trial; occasional protests outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City; and panel events and fundraisers elsewhere.
They have a handful of dedicated champions in Republican politics who continue to highlight their cause — most notably, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who hosted a hearing on the subject in Washington this past week.
During the primaries, Trump, too, actively catered to this constituency. Last year, he invited family members of Jan. 6 defendants to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, and hosted an event for them at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He opened his first rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas, in March 2023, with “And Justice for All”: a recording of Jan. 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a prison phone line as Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance, which was produced by operatives close to his campaign.
“You see the spirit from the hostages,” he said after playing the recording again at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, in March. “They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that, and everybody knows that. And we’re going to be working on that.”
But Trump has noticeably, if subtly, eased off such displays in the general election. He has dropped “And Justice for All” from the regular campaign program, and defendants came up less frequently in speeches this summer than they did last winter and spring.
In June, the Patriot Freedom Fund, a prominent Jan. 6 legal defense group, held an event at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, where speeches were given by Jan. 6 defendants, including Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a convicted riot participant who is known to wear a Hitler mustache and has posted antisemitic statements on social media. Trump sent a video message to the group but did not attend in person.
Two months later, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Council hosted another event at Bedminster, again featuring Hale-Cusanelli and other Jan. 6 rioters and activists. Trump, who was on the premises for a news conference that day, did not meet with them.
Ultimately, his staff shooed the Jan. 6 participants out of the room to make way for Trump’s presentation on inflation.
Campaign staff said that in both cases, the groups had paid to rent the event space at Bedminster and that Trump was not aware that Hale-Cusanelli was going to be attending when he made the video for the June event.
Regarding Hale-Cusanelli’s views, Leavitt, the campaign spokesperson, said, “President Trump condemns hatred and bigotry of any kind, and does not agree with these statements.”
At the Republican National Convention in July, Jan. 6 was mentioned by only one speaker: former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who had been released that morning after serving four months in prison for refusing a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee.
McBride, the lawyer, said that before the convention, he reached out to a group of people he described as being “one phone call away” from Trump, hoping to convince the former president to have a speaker at the convention who could talk about the plight of the rioters.
But that did not happen, McBride said, largely because Trump’s campaign advisers did not want too much focus on the Capitol attack at the event.
“Jan. 6 has always been an issue that more seasoned people in the Trump campaign have been gatekeepers on,” he said. “And they don’t want to draw more attention to the issue.”
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