Jan. 6, 2021: Just Another Day
By Chuck Melvin
Oct. 14, 2024
Three hours after protesters began a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the counting of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, the president stepped up to a podium and told a national TV audience exactly the right thing.
“The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are,” he said angrily. “What we’re seeing are a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness. This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. And it must end now.”
To be clear: This was not President Donald Trump. It was then-President-elect Joe Biden, doing what Trump should have done hours earlier. If Trump had done so, lives could have been saved. Scores of law enforcement officers could have avoided injury. The country could have put the “big lie” behind it once and for all, and focused on recovering from the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
Instead, Trump spent the afternoon watching Fox News and scrolling through Twitter, at one point sending out a tweet that endangered the life of Vice President Mike Pence. Trump also reached out to a few allies, people he hoped might still find some outlandish way to give him a do-over of an election he had clearly lost.
None of these facts are in dispute. They’re all verifiable. They’ve all been backed up by the sworn testimony of Republican lawmakers, Trump Cabinet members, judges, White House staffers, even close relatives who tried frantically to get Trump to call off the insurrection that day.
Heck, you can watch most of it on YouTube, from nearly every angle imaginable.
Here are some of the day’s key moments:
1 a.m. — Trump tweets that Pence has the authority to send electoral votes back to states so they can correct alleged fraud. (No such fraud had occurred. Pence had no such power.)
10:57 a.m. — As members of the pro-Trump militant group known as the Proud Boys head toward the Capitol, one of them tells the BBC, “We’re taking our country back.”
12 p.m. — Trump begins delivering a provocative speech to thousands of supporters at the “Save Our Country” rally across from the White House.
12:30 p.m. — As some in the crowd begin drifting down the street toward the Capitol, Trump says his people have “amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election.” (No such evidence existed.)
1 p.m. — The House and Senate begin the formal counting of electoral votes. Outside, an increasingly restless crowd grows larger after Trump’s speech ends around 1:15 p.m. Some protesters have already begun pushing past temporary fencing and shoving police; one officer falls and is knocked briefly unconscious.
1:45 p.m. — Protesters continue pushing past police. An officer announces that the scene is “now effectively a riot.”
2:10 p.m. — Rioters begin forcing their way into the Capitol, breaking through the doors and windows on the Senate side.
2:20 p.m. — Members of Congress are told to evacuate. Some, including Pence, narrowly escape ahead of the hundreds of people flooding into the building. Armed officers brace a large bench against the door to the House chamber and point weapons to keep rioters out.
2:23 p.m. — Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick is sprayed with a chemical substance. He dies the next day; his death is later ruled to have been from two strokes, possibly exacerbated by the stressful situation.
2:24 p.m. — As the uprising heats up, Trump inflames it by tweeting that Pence “didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”
2:43 p.m. — Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt is shot and killed outside the House chamber as she tries to climb through a window smashed by fellow protesters.
3:00 p.m. — Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy approves the activation of 1,100 National Guard troops. Guard members are mobilized at 3:51 p.m.
4 p.m. — Biden, speaking from Wilmington, Del., calls on Trump to demand an end to the siege on the Capitol.
4:17 p.m. — Trump releases a video on social media praising his supporters but telling them to leave. “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. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”
6:01 p.m. — The Capitol is beginning to clear as armed reinforcements arrive and a curfew takes effect. Trump tweets: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
8 p.m. — Capitol Police declare the building secure, allowing lawmakers to resume counting ballots. They finish at 3:40 a.m., certifying Biden as the victor.
At least four people in the crowd on Jan. 6 died, including Babbitt; a woman who overdosed; and two men, one succumbing to a heart attack and the other to a stroke. In addition, five police officers who were on the scene died in the aftermath: Sicknick, plus four who committed suicide within the next few months. About 150 officers were injured.
Even in an era when norms have been shattered, when being a felon isn’t disqualifying and it’s acceptable for a candidate to brag about grabbing a woman’s private parts, sending an angry mob to the Capitol to overturn a presidential election seems beyond the pale.
Yet here we are, weeks away from the next election, and a sizable portion of the country has chosen to forget, ignore or in some cases celebrate Jan. 6, 2021. Donald Trump is viable.
I totally don’t get it.
So I turned to an expert, someone who spends her days studying such things: Marquette political science professor Julia Azari, a specialist in the American presidency and political parties. She got her PhD at Yale.
While she finds Trump’s resilience somewhat puzzling, she said, the notion that he represents a threat to democracy is awfully abstract compared with issues such as the economy, abortion and immigration.
“Despite things like Jan. 6, Trump turns out to be a very successful transactional figure for the Republican Party,” Azari told me. “He successfully turned the Supreme Court into one that would overturn Roe v. Wade. They got the tax cut legislation passed.”
Plus, an entire election cycle — the 2022 midterms — has come and gone since Jan. 6, 2021. Those elections turned out better than expected for Democrats, but the threat-to-democracy issue just isn’t fresh anymore. It’s an open question whether interest in the issue will perk up in the wake of the moderately juicy Oct. 2 court filing in the federal case accusing Trump of attempting to hold onto power illegally in 2021.
“If you look at polls, Republicans have become more nonchalant about it or more accepting of it as a legitimate protest,” Azari said. “It didn’t necessarily seem like attitudes about this issue would sort along partisan lines, but in fact they have.”
Case in point: In the early afternoon of Jan. 6, shortly after Trump spoke at the Ellipse and before the violence reached inside the Capitol, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell argued forcefully that it was time to put Trump’s big lie to rest. Trump had lost, and anyone arguing otherwise was doing little more than trying to dupe the public.
“Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale — the massive scale — that would have tipped the entire election,” McConnell said that day. “Nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when the doubt itself was incited without any evidence.”
And yet: McConnell, as transactional a politician as the planet has ever seen, plans to vote for Trump next month.
Daniel Hodges, on the other hand, has another, more personal perspective. Hodges was the D.C. Metropolitan police officer caught on video screaming in pain as rioters, surging to get inside the Capitol, crushed him between a door and doorframe. They tore off his helmet, gouged his eye with a thumb, and beat him with his own baton.
The video went viral, becoming one of the most iconic images of Jan. 6.
In an interview with MSNBC reflecting on that day, Hodges was asked about Trump’s and the GOP’s billing themselves as the party of law and order, the supporters of officers such as himself.
“The ones that were beating me and my comrades, telling us that they’re going to kill us, and spraying us with chemical munitions, wasp spray, Tasers, the guns, knives, bombs? No, I don’t think they support law enforcement,” Hodges said. “I didn’t get that impression, at least.”