Trump Returns to the Scene of the Crime
Four years ago, scores of police officers were attacked only yards away from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “weapons and things being thrown, and pepper spray, and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them, screams and moans, and everything else.” One officer later said that he was certain he would die the moment he entered the crowd: “You know, you’re getting pushed, kicked, you know, people are throwing metal bats at you and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, this is fucking it.”
All of this happened because Trump, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he tried on January 6, 2021, to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.”
The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we know only the names of some of the most famous victims of the mob, such as Officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn, and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were severe. Fanone was beaten to the point of a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was attacked by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In his campaign for reelection, the man who conjured this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of the themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump yet again nabbed the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we’re seeing in our streets. We are tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we’re just tired of the crap.”
[Read: Trump’s empty promise of ‘law and order’]
The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly believe is a rise in crime in the streets, but they’ve memory-holed Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of raging insurrectionists against the same police forces that will be protecting him at today’s inauguration. Nothing, however, should be allowed to erase the truth that the party of law and order is now led by not only a convicted felon, but one who callously looked on as outnumbered police officers did battle for hours to protect the lives of the members of the United States Congress.
I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes that they’re all corrupt bullies, potential killers no better than the men involved in the ghastly 2020 murder of George Floyd. My father and brother were both police officers (Dad in the 1950s, and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next-door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer, and I grew up among cops in my small New England city. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.
Trump has done the same through his three presidential campaigns, depicting America as a lawless hellhole. At least Nixon, however, had the advantage of pointing to the other party, and to his political opponents, as the source of danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds the fact that the people who attacked the police on January 6 were his own supporters, acting on what they believed were his wishes.
“I would like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” the conservative writer George Will said in 2021, “because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today will likely thunder on about the return of law and order and swear to make America’s streets safer, but American voters, no matter their party, should remember what actually happened to scores of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.
Police officers at the Capitol were being attacked with an assortment of weapons—bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet came down and felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” the Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in an October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun, because they stole my baton.”) During all of this, Trump, as usual, was tweeting: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Meanwhile, the mob pressed on. One officer recounted that rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they beat and tased him while yelling things such as “I got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”
[Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise]
Trump now refers to many of the rioters who have been convicted and jailed as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon some of them upon taking office. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the Press last month, adding that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”
The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he lauded a choir formed by some of the jailed insurrectionists. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump regularly played it at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said last May.
Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” were charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer. One rioter, Julian Khater, had already pleaded guilty to assaulting multiple officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throwing makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and head,” he wrote to an associate in the weeks after the riot, according to the Justice Department.
Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love.” The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things are happening?” Gonell asked last spring.
Safely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day that the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women on the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.