Four years ago
You didn’t imagine it, the images and videos, the injuries and deaths. They were not “deep state” fakes. Those people weren’t tourists. They weren’t patriots. The violent Trump mob consisted of MAGA rioters and insurrectionists. After four years of a Democratic administration left with cleaning up, Americans inexplicably elected Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, to another term. It’s almost as if they mean to prove the Constitution a suicide pact.
Trump is preparing to pardon a large chunk of the Jan. 6 convicted as victims of political persecution, just as woe-is-ME is as innocent as a babe.
Trump said he would issue pardons to rioters on “Day 1” of his presidency, which begins Jan. 20. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added 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.”
His promise, made throughout his campaign for the White House, is shadowing events Monday as lawmakers gather to certify a presidential election for the first time since 2021, when Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol and temporarily halted the certification of an election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
And Trump did lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden. He’s spent much of his non-golf time since then trying to rewrite that history and will spend the next four doing so from the Oval Office.
More than 1,250 have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials in connection with Jan. 6, with more than 650 receiving prison time ranging from a few days to 22 years .
President Joe Biden speaks out this morning in the Washington Post, noting that his vice president, Kamala Harris, will faithfully fulfill her duty as president of the Senate to oversee certification of the election she lost [to Trump; Biden will not name him]. Americans must never forget the coup [Trump] attempted on Jan. 6, 2021 lest we see a repeat. Yet Trump and his MAGA followers will try to eradicate the memory:
An unrelenting effort has been underway [by Trump] to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.
This is not what happened.
In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.
Never forget, Biden urges.
How can people deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, the documentary evidence of trials and investigations, and the testimony of the survivors?
How indeed?
