President Donald Trump and the Democratic Party have finally found something they can agree on: keeping Jan. 6, 2021, in the news for as long as possible. It’s understandable why the opposition would want to remind Americans what happened, but Trump’s importuning is a bit more confusing.
The White House published a webpage on Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of the riot, that attempts to rewrite history by portraying the Trump supporters who breached the Capitol as heroes and blaming Democrats for the security failures that allowed them to delay the certification of the election.
Think for a moment about the time officials must have put into this. What were they trying to accomplish?
Were they trying to remind Americans that, on his first day back in office, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone who committed violent acts at the Capitol, including assaulting police officers? Almost three-quarters of U.S. adults disapproved of pardoning the violent convicts, including most Republicans. Do the president’s advisers think it’s a winning political strategy to cast Trump as soft on crime?
What does the administration gain by messaging to the public that the president simply cannot let go of his 2020 defeat? Does the White House think it’s doing the GOP any favors by calling former Vice President Mike Pence a coward? How would they have felt if Vice President Kamala Harris had done on Jan. 6, 2025, what Trump wanted Pence to do in 2021?
Many voters believed that Jan. 6 disqualified Trump from returning to the Oval Office — but not enough to stop him from winning the 2024 presidential election. Democrats discovered too late that running on democracy was ineffective after President Joe Biden let inflation and illegal immigration run rampant. Trump’s Jan. 6 truther webpage is an elaborate attempt to troll the president’s critics. Judging by the reaction on social media, he provoked the response he wanted.
It’s easy and understandable to respond to these provocations with emotion. They are legitimately insulting, especially to the scores of police officers who sustained injuries. But the reality is that the stunt is an embarrassing misuse of government resources, and some White House staffers clearly have too much time on their hands.
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