When it comes to January 6 and the 2020 election, the president’s insecurities are on full display.
When it comes to January 6 and the 2020 election, the president’s insecurities are on full display.
O ver the last few months, Donald Trump has seemed imperturbable.
His cease-fire with Iran teeters on the brink as global oil prices settle into their postwar plateau, giving Republicans palpitations ahead of a fraught midterm election cycle? Trump insists he doesn’t care. Republican voters abandon Trump’s preferred candidate in favor of a “MAHA”-flavored critic of his administration? Trump shrugs it off. The president’s beloved White House ballroom-slash-offensive-weapons-platform plan hits a wall? Trump takes it in relative stride.
It turns out that the president is not as unshakable as he has recently appeared — not, at least, when his pride is at stake. It was NBC News anchor Kristen Welker, of all people, who revealed that Trump’s skin is as thin as it ever was when she prodded him to address his “weaponization fund’s” failure to launch. But it’s not the fund nor its intended beneficiaries that drove him over the edge. It was, as ever, his undying commitment to the 2020 election fraud narrative.
“Do you think anyone who attacked police officers on January 6 should get taxpayer money?” was the question that really set Trump off. The January 6 convicts were victims of “crooked” and “dirty cops,” he insisted, focusing specifically and at length on former FBI Director James Comey (whom Trump removed from office in May 2017 and who had nothing to do with the January 6 convictions).
“They sent people to jail who did nothing wrong,” Trump continued. “Well, it’s not been presented in a court of law,” Welker replied. “The election was rigged!” Trump exclaimed in response. “It was a dirty election!”
The two bickered over whether California’s painfully slow vote-counting process sufficed for evidence of the sort of fraud that Trump alleges took place on a national scale six years ago until Trump had his fill of the debate. “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked; your press is crooked,” Trump barked. “And Meet the Press is crooked.”
Welker defended her professional integrity, but the president repeated his charge. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” he roared — his face as red as his typically tawny complexion allows. “I’ve had enough,” the president said as he tore off his lavalier microphone and headed for the exits with NBC’s cameras still rolling. “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”
If Trump is as self-conscious about the “weaponization fund” as he appears to be, he’s earned his discomfort. The president’s efforts to manifest in the real world the unreality he has constructed in his own head have damaged both the American social fabric and his own political brand.
Within the first hours of Trump’s second term, the president issued nearly 1,600 pardons and commutations to anyone implicated in the events of January 6, 2021. But most of those offenders were convicted only of misdemeanors and, for the most part, sentenced to probation. The only people the president could spring from incarceration were those convicted of more serious offenses than, for example, trespassing.
Devlyn Thompson attacked a police officer with a metal baton. Robert Palmer bludgeoned another officer with a fire extinguisher, among other items of debris he could find strewn about the ransacked Capitol steps. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the faces of three Capitol Hill police officers. David Dempsey used all these weapons and more in his frenzied attack on law enforcement. They are free today, along with those who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for the preparation and planning that culminated in that premeditated act of mass violence.
When those who are inclined toward criminality encounter few consequences for their actions, their criminal predilections do not abate. No one should be shocked, therefore, to learn that some of the beneficiaries of Trump’s mercy returned to crime.
Edward Kelley, for example, was subsequently convicted of plotting to kill the FBI special agents who investigated his conduct during the January 6 riots. Kelley’s lawyers tried to argue that Trump’s pardon should extend to his subsequent conduct, too. Fortunately, the presiding judge wasn’t buying it.
Zachary Alam was filmed assaulting police officers and beating at the shatterproof glass protecting the Speaker’s Lobby in the Capitol — the site where Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd. Within a year of his unconditional pardon from Trump, Alam was arrested and convicted again for breaking into a private home and burgling it.
Andrew Paul Johnson was sentenced to life in prison by a Florida judge after a jury found him guilty of “sexually abusing two middle-school aged children.” According to NPR’s reporting, Johnson’s victims testified that their abuser “tried to keep the children quiet by telling them he would share millions of dollars in restitution money he expected to receive from the Trump administration in connection with his Jan. 6 case.”
Of those who faced charges related to January 6, almost 100 of them have been accused of new crimes, according to a nonprofit organization’s analysis reviewed by the New York Times:
At least 16 have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. At least 20 have been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or public intoxication.
Indeed, the president’s administration has attempted to rehabilitate the reputations of those who participated in the day’s violence.
Jared Wise was among those who were filmed on the Capitol steps on January 6 urging his comrades in arms to “kill” the “Nazi” “Gestapo” police interfering with their riot. That was then. Today, “Jared Wise is a valued member of the Justice Department,” according to a DOJ statement.
Why wouldn’t Wise be welcomed back into the fold? As U.S. pardon attorney and the director of the “Weaponization Working Group” inside the Justice Department, Ed Martin, insisted, so much of what happened on January 6 was “staged” that skepticism toward the validity of their convictions is warranted. And even if it wasn’t “staged,” is political violence really that big of a deal?
“I’m not saying if you hit a cop, you can get excused,” Martin told an interviewer in 2024. “I am saying the more we find out about how staged and managed this was, the more we have to have less judgment on somebody who hits a cop.”
“I’ve seen people hit a cop,” Trump’s “weaponization” point man continued, “and that doesn’t make it the end of the world.” This from the self-described “law and order” administration.
The old antiperspirant ad said it best: “Never let them see you sweat.” The president must have missed that one. His on-camera meltdown is, however, revealing.
When it comes to January 6, the president’s insecurities are on full display. As they should be. History’s verdict on the Trump administration is still out. But when it comes to the 2020 conspiracy theory and all the civil unrest that has flowed from it, Trump’s conduct is irredeemable. And posterity doesn’t grant pardons.