Many who blamed Trump for Jan. 6 riot now back him
WASHINGTON — In the follow-up to their 2018 bestseller “How Democracies Die,” authors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write about three rules that political parties must follow: accept the results of fair elections, reject the use of violence to gain power and break ties to extremists.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, they write, only one U.S. political party “violated all three.”
Saturday marked the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and Donald Trump, the former president, is far-and-away the leading Republican candidate in 2024. He still refuses to acknowledge his earlier loss to President Joe Biden. Far from rejecting the rioters, he has suggested he would pardon some of those who have been convicted of violent crimes. Rather than distance himself from extremists, he welcomes them at his rallies.
And Trump is now backed by many of the Republican leaders who fled for their lives and hid from the rioters, even some who had condemned Trump. Several top GOP leaders have endorsed his candidacy.
The support for Trump starkly highlights the divisions in the aftermath of the deadly storming of the Capitol and frames the question about whose definition of governance will prevail — or if democracy will prevail at all.
“If our political leaders do not stand up in defense of democracy, our democracy won’t be defended,” said Levitsky, one of the Harvard professors whose new book is “Tyranny of the Minority.”
“There’s no country in the world, no country on Earth in history, where the politicians abdicated democracy but the institutions held,” he told The Associated Press. “People have to defend democracy.”
Trump’s persistent false claims that the election of 2020 was stolen — which has been rejected in at least 60 court cases, every state election certification and by the former president’s onetime attorney general — continue to animate the presidential race as he eyes a rematch with Biden.
Biden, speaking Friday near Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge, commemorated Jan. 6, saying on that day “we nearly lost America — lost it all.”
Biden said Trump is now trying to revise the narrative of what happened that day — calling the rioters “patriots” and promising to pardon them. And he said some Republicans in Congress were complicit.
“When the attack on Jan. 6 happened there was no doubt about the truth,” Biden said. “Now these MAGA voices — who know the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 — have abandoned the truth and abandoned the democracy.”
Saturday was the last time the anniversary passed before Congress will be called upon again, on Jan. 6, 2025, to certify the results of the presidential election — democracy once more put to the test.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who led Trump’s impeachment over the insurrection, said Biden’s 306-232 electoral victory in 2020 remains “the hard, inescapable, irradicable fact that Donald Trump and his followers have not been able to accept — to this day.”