It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day President Trump’s second term began to take shape.
Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.
That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. Once Mr. Trump won election again in 2024, despite his role in encouraging the riot and his many distortions about it, it emboldened him to govern in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.
Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries.
All this would have been hard to conceive for many Americans five years ago. Disgust was bipartisan for a time because so many episodes of that day seemed unforgettable.
As members of Congress were meeting to certify the presidential election result, more than 2,000 protesters forced their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and overturning barricades. They chanted about their desire to hang Vice President Mike Pence and track down Representative Nancy Pelosi. Fearing for their lives, elected officials, their aides and people who happened to be visiting the Capitol scrambled to find safe hiding spaces. The rioters eventually broke into the Senate chamber.
The victims who suffered the worst violence were the police officers protecting the Capitol. Patrick McCaughey, one of the rioters, pinned a Metropolitan Police officer, Daniel Hodges, with a stolen riot shield. Steven Cappuccio, another attacker, used Officer Hodges’s own baton to beat him, leaving him to scream through bloodied teeth. David Dempsey discharged a stream of pepper spray that burned the lungs, throat, eyes and face of Detective Phuson Nguyen. Julian Khater shot pepper spray into the face of the Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who suffered a series of strokes hours later and died.
As the deceased officer’s mother, Gladys Sicknick, later said to the attackers in court, “All of you bear responsibility for the injuries sustained by Brian’s fellow officers — the broken bones, head trauma and the continuing mental anguish they suffer and will endure for the rest of their lives.” Four other officers on duty that day died by suicide in the seven months after the attacks.
Mr. Trump made possible the lawlessness. After he lost the 2020 election, he spent weeks peddling the lie that he had rightfully won. He encouraged state officials to “find” votes for him or simply appoint electors loyal to him. He tried to pressure Mr. Pence not to certify the result. In a final attempt to subvert democracy and overturn the election, Mr. Trump’s supporters went to Washington on Jan. 6.
That morning, he appeared at the Ellipse, a park near the White House, and suggested to his supporters gathered there that he would march with them to the Capitol. He said so even though he knew some of them were armed, according to House Jan. 6 committee witness testimony. “Fight like hell,” he told the mob.
After the protesters marched to Capitol Hill and forced their way into the Capitol, Mr. Trump tweeted criticism of Mr. Pence at almost the same moment that Mr. Pence had to flee to a secure location. As the violence intensified and Mr. Trump’s staff implored him to intervene, he delayed sending security reinforcements to the Capitol. He sent a couple of halfhearted tweets urging his supporters to stay peaceful but did not tell them to leave the building.
Not until almost three hours after the attack began did Mr. Trump release a video telling the rioters to go home. It was clear that restoring peace was far from his priority. In the video, he dwelled on his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, which was the mob’s justification for attacking the certification of votes. His video was, at best, a mixed message, in which he signaled that the cause of the riot was just even as he called for nonviolence long after violence had started.
That video would mark the high point of his chagrin for the Jan. 6 violence. At 6 p.m., less than two hours after releasing the video, he returned to distorting the historical record. “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Over the next several years, Jan. 6 became a “day of love” in Mr. Trump’s telling: The rioters were “patriots,” and those detained were “hostages” whose suffering compared to that of Japanese Americans interned during World War II. He made common cause with the most extreme elements of his coalition to manipulate history. Together, they rallied right-wing media to their cause, silenced all but a few Republican critics and intimidated corporate leaders into complicity.
This behavior, though inexcusable, was not shocking. It fit with Mr. Trump’s character, as both a businessman and a politician who has long pursued his self-interest without legal or ethical restraint.
The shocking part of the story was the response of so many other people in government, media and business.
Initially, many denounced him. As rioters stormed the Capitol, the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham sent texts to the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, urging him to persuade Mr. Trump to end the attack. Amazon and other companies suspended campaign donations to Republicans who had refused to certify the 2020 election results. Facebook and Twitter banned Mr. Trump from their platforms.
The most important role fell to Congress. It had the power to bar him from holding office again, the appropriate punishment for a political leader who encouraged and praised an attack on Congress. The House impeached him, with 222 Democratic and 10 Republican votes, just seven days after Jan. 6.
Hard as it may be to recall now, the Senate appeared close to convicting him and barring him from office. As The Times reported on Jan. 12, Senator Mitch McConnell, then the Republican leader, “has concluded that President Trump committed impeachable offenses and believes that Democrats’ move to impeach him will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party, according to people familiar with Mr. McConnell’s thinking.”
Within days, though, Mr. McConnell surrendered his influence and his principles. He “never mounted a campaign to persuade other Republicans to join him,” The Times reported. He allowed Mr. Trump’s supporters to dominate the debate. Convicting Mr. Trump would have required 17 Republican votes in the Senate, and seven senators courageously voted for conviction. The most consequential unknown of Jan. 6 is what would have happened if Mr. McConnell had shown similar courage. He might well have found the 10 extra votes needed to change American history. In the end, he did not even vote for conviction himself.
It will be the defining stain on Mr. McConnell’s legacy. He may realize it, too. In the past year, he has turned into a rare Republican senator willing to defy Mr. Trump on some major policies.
After the Senate voted against conviction, there were no similarly clean paths toward accountability. The House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee did admirable work, reconstructing the day and Mr. Trump’s role in it, in 2022. That work appears to have had a political impact. In the midterm elections held months later, Mr. Trump’s allies and defenders fared five percentage points worse, on average, than other Republicans. In swing states, prominent 2020 election deniers lost their races. Still, dissatisfaction with the Biden administration handed Republicans control of the House, and they abandoned any Jan. 6 accountability once they were in charge. Instead, they began investigating their colleagues who had attempted to bring justice to Mr. Trump.
The legal system also took some steps to fill the accountability gap. But it moved slowly and ineffectively. Justice Department officials, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, agonized over whether to prosecute a former president from the other party. In the end, they did, but their case produced arguably the worst of all results. It happened too slowly for a trial to take place before Mr. Trump ran for president again in 2024 and thus potentially to influence public perceptions, as the House’s Jan. 6 hearings did two years earlier. Yet the existence of the case allowed Mr. Trump to cast himself as the victim of a politicized prosecution.
The strongest state case, in Georgia, was even more flawed. Prosecutors, led by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, charged Mr. Trump and 18 others with a racketeering conspiracy for their efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election. Those prosecutors also moved slowly. Worse, Ms. Willis undermined the case by engaging in a secret, deeply irresponsible romantic relationship with a prosecutor who reported to her.
Even without these issues, the criminal justice system would always have been a less effective means than Congress for holding Mr. Trump accountable. Only Congress could have definitively ended his political career. A convicted person can still run for federal office.
With the political and legal systems failing to punish him, much of the rest of the country started to move on. Business leaders made excuses for him. The conservative media establishment promoted him again and cheered on the purge of Republicans who had criticized his role in Jan. 6. Many voters, too, forgave — or at least proved willing to overlook his crimes — and decided that a second Trump presidency was preferable to Mr. Biden’s or Kamala Harris’s leadership. Some 77 million Americans voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.
He learned that he could get away with more than he dared to try in his first term.
Once he was elected, his post-Jan. 6 experience inspired his administration’s goals and methods. He and his aides concluded that intimidation and lawlessness could yield victories even in seemingly unwinnable and sometimes illegal circumstances.
They used Jan. 6 as a litmus test to identify and promote loyalists. They asked prospective national security officials whether the Capitol assault was “an inside job,” The Washington Post reported. The administration gave senior jobs to extremists, opportunists and conspiracy theorists. Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s current F.B.I. director, promoted the theory that the F.B.I. had secretly encouraged Jan. 6 violence. Mr. Patel and other administration officials retaliated against prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who had insisted on enforcing the law impartially. Many noble people have been fired or demoted. Some face unjust federal investigations.
On the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with Jan. 6. The group included hundreds of defendants found to have assaulted law enforcement officers. It included Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, who helped organize the attack. The pardons came eight days after JD Vance, preparing to take office as vice president, said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” The president has also pardoned supporters, like Rudolph Giuliani, who tried to overturn the 2020 election results with fraudulent electors.
The pardons issue a message: If you break the law to protect me, you will be supported, and if you uphold the law to restrain me, you will be persecuted. Today, Ed Martin, who helped raise money for Jan. 6 defendants, holds a top Justice Department job effectively dedicated to hounding Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies. Mr. Martin and his working group are investigating prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and members of Congress whose jobs obligated them to investigate Jan. 6.
The thuggishness extends far beyond the people who were directly involved in Jan. 6 cases. The legacy of that day has taught Mr. Trump how to use power more aggressively to advance his interests. In his second term, he has surrounded himself with officials who accede to his lawless demands. One example: Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has accused outspoken Democratic lawmakers of mortgage fraud and gone after Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor whose views on monetary policy Mr. Trump does not like.
Mr. Trump has also learned that congressional Republicans will bow to him even when he treats them with contempt or ignores the Constitution. He has defied the War Powers Act by blowing up boats in international waters, set high tariff rates without consulting Congress and nominated preposterous candidates for the Senate to confirm. He has forced the retirement of legislators who buck him. He has suggested that the House of Representatives has little independent power. “I’m the speaker and the president,” he recently joked. In private, legislators acknowledge that they obey him partly because they fear violence from his supporters.
Mr. Trump likewise plays the courts more successfully than in his first term. The Supreme Court has helped him, first by ruling in 2024 that presidents have almost complete immunity from future prosecution. As a result, he knows that he faces little legal jeopardy for his most outrageous actions. The justices have also proved unwilling to halt some of Mr. Trump’s most dubious second-term policies, such as his tariffs and use of ethnic profiling in immigration raids. The justices have instead allowed most policies to proceed while the cases gradually wind through the courts. Much as he ran out the clock on his post-Jan. 6 prosecutions, he has reshaped U.S. trading relationships, immigration policy and other areas before the legal system has roused itself to intervene.
Again and again, Mr. Trump dares the system to stop him. He does so knowing that the same system that failed to hold him to account for Jan. 6 is unlikely to do so now. The effects might outlast him. He has shown his Republican would-be successors, starting with Mr. Vance, that they can rewrite palpable history, encourage federal crimes for political ends by pardoning guilty people, exact revenge on those who do their duty to uphold the law and manipulate a docile Supreme Court majority willing to hand sweeping, unprecedented powers to a president.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, he has governed as if Jan. 6 never ended. The damage to the nation is severe.
As dark as this story has become, it is not over. Its next chapters will depend on what Americans do now, especially those who share some of Mr. Trump’s policy preferences but remain loyal to American democracy. Many people have already responded heroically to Jan. 6. Police officers risked their lives and suffered beatings to defend the Capitol. Hundreds of F.B.I. agents, prosecutors, congressional aides and others investigated the day’s events and created a historical record that Mr. Trump cannot erase. A small number of elected Republicans — including Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and Mitt Romney — insisted on defending the Constitution, at the cost of their careers.
The past few months offer some new reasons for hope. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have fallen. His party has lost elections. Lower-court judges, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have blocked some of his policies and called out his brazen disregard for truth. Even some congressional Republicans have voted against him on a few matters, like the Jeffrey Epstein files and health care subsidies. These developments make it possible to imagine a better future.
The Jan. 6 era turns five years old on Tuesday. The anniversary will always be a mournful one for America. The nation’s challenge now is to ensure that the day is ultimately viewed as it initially was: as an aberration. Americans must summon the collective will to bring this era to an end and make certain that the violence, lawlessness and injustice of Jan. 6 do not endure.
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