So much information has gone under the bridge about the insurrection that I’ve lost sight of some of the more interesting details that flush out what happened on January 6th — and who is responsible. (People like Marcy Wheeler who follow the trials are very well aware, of course.)
This piece from June 2021 by Amanda Carpenter came to my attention over the holidays and I thought it was interesting. If you still think that Trump didn’t actually incite the insurrection, this is important to consider:
To understand January 6, 2021, we must first look back to June 1, 2020.
That was the day Donald Trump delivered a terse Rose Garden speech threatening to deploy the U.S. military to any city or state that “refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents.” The speech was prompted by the protests that began on May 26 in Minneapolis and spread throughout the country after George Floyd was killed by police. Trump’s staff argued that the threatened military deployment would have been permitted under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which empowers the president to deploy federal troops for domestic law enforcement under certain circumstances.
As Trump spoke, federal law enforcement officers, joined by officers from other local jurisdictions, clashed with protesters near Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. Officers outfitted in riot gear pushed protesters away from the square, firing rubber bullets at them. Tear gas was used. Army helicopters buzzed the crowds. Trump then marched across the square, flanked by officials and aides, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. All so Trump could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Church.
The message was clear. Trump had a military and was willing to use it. But the backlash from the military community came quickly. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he was “sickened” to “see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church.” Gen. James Mattis, the respected Marine general who had preceded Esper as Trump’s defense secretary, said he was “angry and appalled.”
Secretary Esper soon distanced himself from Trump, albeit after the fact. He told reporters at a June 3 Pentagon briefing, “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Gen. Milley later reportedly got into a “heated discussion” with Trump over whether to send active-duty troops to the streets, and in July he publicly apologized, saying, “I should not have been there” for Trump’s photo op.
But Republican politicians and conservative commentators supported Trump’s move. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Send in the Troops”; it was so controversial that the paper later said it should never have been published and one of the responsible editors resigned.
Through it all, Trump never let go of the idea. And as summer changed into fall, talk on the right of an “insurrection” that might be met with a military response shifted from the George Floyd protests and civil unrest to the 2020 election. The same terms and the same proposed action, just a new target.
In a Fox News appearance in September, host Jeanine Pirro asked Trump how he would react if he won the 2020 election and Democrats rioted. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want,” Trump said. “Look, it’s called ‘insurrection.’ We just send in, and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy.” That same month, in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars program, Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone—who would later be pardoned by Trump for witness tampering in the Russia investigation and lying to Congress—also talked up the idea of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
Although Trump and his allies were in disagreement with the military community about the Insurrection Act, Trump seemed to have other ideas about whom he could call for backup.
During the September 29 debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he was willing to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and . . . say that they need to stand down.” Trump replied “sure” but then said the Proud Boys groups should “stand back and stand by” for the election.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Trump continued, “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
After the press called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump quickly fired Esper, who had openly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act, and installed Christopher Miller as acting defense secretary. And, as “Stop the Steal” efforts gained steam through November and December, Trump’s allies Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Michael Flynn often advocated using the Insurrection Act as a catch-all solution to any number of problems Trump faced. One disturbing Politico headline makes the point: “MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office.”
I know the J6 Committee pursued some of this. But I haven’t seen it put so succinctly before. We knew that Trump had been basically calling for the Insurrection Act since the George Floyd protests and kept talking about it all the way up to January 6th. I think what I didn’t understand before was how much having “insurrection” out there in the ether was being interpreted by his own followers.
If anyone was primed to take marching orders about insurrection from Commander-in-Chief Trump, it was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. To him, it must have sounded like a bugle call directly in his ears.
Rhodes, who founded the group in 2009, has been talking about insurrection for years. And the combination of COVID lockdowns and BLM protests apparently triggered his militant aspirations more than ever. He wrote on Facebook in August 2020 that “Civil war is here, right now” and warned there would be “open warfare with Marxist insurrectionists by Election Day.” Shortly after the media called the election for Biden, Rhodes said in a livestreamed speech that viewers should “stand up now and call on the president to suppress the insurrection.”
He meant it.
Court filings from the Department of Justice containing communications from Oath Keeper militants—some of whom are said to have acted as personal security for Roger Stone at “Stop the Steal” rallies, including on the eve of the January 6 insurrection—show how clear Rhodes’s thinking was about it.
According to prosecutors, Rhodes held a planning meeting for the attack on November 9, 2020. During it, he said:
-“We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country. Because if you don’t guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war, and a bloody—you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight.”
-He told his followers they needed to be prepared to fight Antifa, which he characterized as a group of individuals with whom “if the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa—if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. I’m willing to sacrifice myself for that. Let the fight start there. That will give President Trump what he needs, frankly. If things go kinetic, good. If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”
-He continued, “I do want some Oath Keepers to stay on the outside, and to stay fully armed and prepared to go in armed, if they have to. . . . So our posture’s gonna be that we’re posted outside of D.C., um, awaiting the president’s orders. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia” (emphasis added).
Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Others were as well. They heard Trump talking about insurrection and “stand back and stand by” and thought he was giving instructions.
He didn’t evoke the Insurrection Act on January 6th. Instead, he sent the crowd to the Capitol and watched as they stormed the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power.