News
January 6, 2022 – 6:00 pm (ET)
The new Lost Cause
Former President Donald Trump and his allies on Thursday clung to false claims about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as the nation marked the one-year anniversary of the violent insurrection.
Reacting to President Joe Biden, who blamed him for the deadly event, Trump issued statements repeating his assertions that the voting was rigged. Those claims have been thoroughly debunked.
In a speech marking the anniversary, Biden said Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election fueled the riot. Biden said the election was the most scrutinized in U.S. history, and that the riot was an un-American attempt to derail democracy incited by a politician who couldn’t accept the people’s will.
A look at the claims:
TRUMP, on the Biden administration: ““That’s what you get when you have a rigged Election.”
TRUMP: “In actuality, the Big Lie was the Election itself.”
THE FACTS: To be clear, no widespread corruption was found and no election was stolen from Trump.
Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump had when he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, which he repeatedly described as a “landslide.” (Trump ended up with 304 electoral votes because two electors defected.) Biden achieved victory by prevailing in key battleground states.
The Hill, January 6, 2022 – 5:30 pm (ET)
President Joe Biden on Thursday forcefully condemned Donald Trump’s relentless election-overturning efforts that sparked the deadly breach of the Capitol by his supporters and continues to motivate deep national division. He marked the anniversary by saying the rioters had held a “dagger at the throat of democracy” but failed to succeed.
Biden’s criticism was blistering of the defeated president whom he blamed for the attack that has fundamentally changed Congress and the nation, and raised global concerns about the future of American democracy.
“For the first time in our history, a president not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol,” Biden said. “You can’t love your country only when you win.”
His voice booming at times, filling the ornate Statuary Hall where rioters had laid siege, the president called on Americans to remember what they saw Jan. 6 with their own eyes: the mob attacking police, breaking windows, a Confederate flag inside the Capitol, gallows erected outside threatening to hang the vice president — all while Trump sat at the White House watching it on TV.
“The former president’s supporters are trying to rewrite history. They want you to see Election Day as the day of insurrection and the riot that took place here on January 6 as a true expression of the will of the people. Can you think of a more twisted way to look at this country, to look at America? I cannot.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) blasted President Biden for the tone of a speech he gave on Thursday marking the anniversary of the Capitol riot, calling it a “brazen” politicizing of the events a year ago.
Graham and other lawmakers were evacuated on Jan. 6, 2021, after a mob of supporters of former President Trump overwhelmed Capitol Police and entered the building, halting temporarily Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote.
“What brazen politicization of January 6 by President Biden,” Graham said in a tweet sent during Biden’s speech. “I wonder if the Taliban who now rule Afghanistan with al-Qaeda elements present, contrary to President Biden’s beliefs, are allowing this speech to be carried?”
Graham was referring to the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, which Biden oversaw last year, an episode the president has been widely criticized by Republicans over.
Graham’s critics used his tweet to recall his condemnation of the violence carried out by Trump’s supporters as well as his attempts to distance himself from the former president’s repeated false claims of a “rigged” election in 2020.
“Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey,” Graham said on the Senate floor after the mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I hate it being this way. Oh my god I hate it … but today all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I tried to be helpful.”
In a statement issued separately on Thursday morning, Graham, who has since maintained a close personal relationship with Trump, said he “still cannot believe that a mob was able to take over the United States Capitol during such a pivotal moment.”
FivethirtyEight, January 6, 2022 – 9:00 am (ET)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/white-backlash-is-a-type-of-racial-reckoning-too/
CNN, January 6, 2022 – 12:00 pm (ET)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/06/politics/january-6-insurrection-legacy/index.html
Politico, January 6, 2022 – 2:30 pm (ET)
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/06/congress-members-capitol-riot-reflection-525949
For more coverage of the Jan. 6 attack, read our collection of essays and reflections examining where we are as a country one year later, including what has — and hasn’t — changed since a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
On May 25, 2020, George Perry Floyd Jr., a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered in broad daylight by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer with the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the days and weeks following, millions took to the streets in the U.S. and around the world, with chants of “Black Lives Matter” and calls for racial justice that reimagined policing in America. Public opinion was increasingly supportive of the protests. Given both the suddenness and the scale of the response to Floyd’s murder, something felt different. We weren’t always certain what that difference was, but there was something that seemed to distinguish this moment.
Pundits and politicians, including President Biden, said this was a moment of “racial reckoning” — a moment for some optimism, despite the tragedy of it all. This optimism seemed rooted in the belief that if there was ever a moment to unsettle America’s racial hierarchy, this was it. Now was the time, we were told, to bring relief to those who had long lived under a regime of racial oppression. Some of us were skeptical, but the general consensus was that racial progress was on the horizon — that better, brighter, more equitable days were ahead.
But for a reckoning to occur, there has to be more than just an acknowledgement of injustice. There has to be action. Reckoning implied a reprieve for the Black Lives Matter activists who had spent the years since Trayvon Martin’s killing protesting police violence. Reckoning implied transforming public safety. Reckoning implied support for policies to intervene in the yawning racial wealth gap, the perpetual employment gap, and the growing life expectancy gap.
In short, a reckoning suggested the country was on the cusp of lasting change. But to the extent that a reckoning occurred, it was short-lived and didn’t lead to fundamental changes.
If January 6, 2021, was just one infamous day in history, its stain on the American story would still reverberate through generations.
But the US Capitol insurrection was far from a self-contained day of rage. It was both the culmination of the rule of an aberrant, demagogic President and a catalyst for the most enduring onslaught on America’s system of elective governance in decades. It legitimized violence as a tool of political expression among millions of citizens and cast the haunting possibility that as horrific as that day was, it may be only a preview of a deeper democratic rupture to come.
The aftermath of hours of terror ignited by Donald Trump inciting a mob to “fight like hell” to deny the will of voters revealed that large chunks of the Republican Party had rejected the principle of an expansive, unified democracy for which its first President, Abraham Lincoln, had died. Far from destroying the mythology of Trumpism, Republicans clambered onto the metaphorical wreckage in the Capitol to launch a nationwide voter-suppression scheme that could make it easier to steal future elections without the need for a baying mob to storm the Capitol.
A year on, the assault on Congress that interrupted nearly two-and-a-half centuries of peaceful transfers of power is one of those dates whose notoriety allows it to stand alone. If September 11, 2001, was the day that destroyed an age-old illusion underpinning US power — that the mainland was immune to outside attack — January 6 brought an epiphany that democracy may not actually be forever. It revealed that the authoritarian forces that preoccupied the founders, and that have simmered below American civil society ever since, are unleashed.
Every denizen of the Capitol faced an attack one year ago — but 523 of them returned to session hours later. We spoke one-on-one with 13 of those lawmakers about the day’s effects. Excerpts from those interviews follow, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
… on when the reality of the attack sank in
SEN. JON TESTER (D-MONT.)
I still remember looking on that TV and watching the people run up the steps. Thinking, when they hit the steps — I knew we were in trouble.
SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI (R-ALASKA)
During that impeachment trial, when we saw it all knit together — in terms of the maps and the videos and the footage and saw the whole thing taking place at once — it was shocking.
REP. BRIAN FITZPATRICK (R-PA.)
It was already a hard day for me. It was the one-year anniversary of my brother’s passing [former Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.)]. My whole family was gathered at my parents’ house. I wasn’t there. And they’re texting me, as I’m sitting on the floor watching the proceedings occur, saying, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m thinking, ‘They’re asking me, am I OK for the one-year mark.’ I didn’t realize they were watching television, watching the Capitol get stormed. No idea.
That was the case for a lot of us. We were getting pinged before we had any clue.
