Larry Wilson: Five years after, Trump tries to erase Jan. 6 history
Five years on from the worst assault against our republic and its (occasionally tarnished, true) institutions of democracy, the White House administration of the felonious Donald Trump is busying itself literally erasing from the historical record the magnitude of that crime, when thousands of alternately misguided or perverse Americans, egged on by their president, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election in a violent attack on the United States Capitol.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the mob attacked police officers in its effort to breach the building in which the results of that election would be certified. Specifically they were after the vice president of the United States, a Trump loyalist until he unexpectedly suddenly wasn’t; like the police officers, he had simply decided to do his job, signing off on the electoral reality dealt his administration at the polls.
In the months after the melee, federal prosecutors tracked down most of the worst of the criminals, and over a thousand of them were tried and found guilty, some of them doing the appropriate hard time in prison.
Until, that is, Trump was elected again, and on his first day in office, signed a blanket pardon for all involved.
And now, in a move perhaps worse for history than the leaving of patently punishable people unpunished, Trump is ordering that the story of their crimes be removed, and has stopped even the dignified hanging of a Capitol plaque commemorating the law-enforcement officers who valiantly tried to stop the crime from happening. Five people died in the riot and just after it; more than 140 police officers were injured. Several died later, some by suicide.
President Donald Trump calls Jan. 6 a “day of love.”
Just before the fifth anniversary of the murderous attack on our Capitol, the Trump administration created a new website paid for by our tax dollars containing claims that the mob were “peaceful protesters” who were provoked by the police officers they attacked. Rather than trying to protect our democracy, it says the Capitol Police determination to hold back rioters breaking into the building — going into a weird present tense — “escalates tensions.” Wildly even weirder, the website of our White House blames then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose office was breached in the riot, for the debacle of Jan. 6.
As Trump attempts five years on to erase the public record of the real story, one news organization, NPR, has valiantly sued the government and gained access to the deleted videos and audio recordings from the riot, and has put them online to create a permanent archive of the truth, which you can find at npr.org/J6archive.
Here’s a bit of the audio Trump tried to destroy, from an entrance to the Capitol police were trying to protect, their eyes full of chemical spray from the rioters:
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: Let’s go, on me. Let’s go, MPD. We are not losing the U.S. Capitol today. Do you hear me? (SOUNDBITE OF LOUD BANGING) UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #4: Yes, sir. UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: We are not losing the U.S. Capitol. Night sticks out. (SOUNDBITE OF HIGH-PITCHED RINGING) UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #3: Shields. UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #5: Shields up front. UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #6: He’s got a weapon in his hand. UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER #7: OK. (SOUNDBITE OF GLASS SHATTERING).
That sound of breaking glass was the sound of a nation on the brink of surrendering to despotism. Terrible as the day was, terrible as the deaths of and permanent injuries to so many women and men who tried to protect us was, we did not surrender. We prosecuted the perps and we found them guilty.
Until Trump came back, waved a wand, pardoned them all. The Republican National Committee officially calls Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” And here we are in 2026, America: a nation with hoodlums in charge.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.