Republicans blamed Trump; now, they back him
WASHINGTON — In the 2023 follow-up to their 2018 bestseller, “How Democracies Die,” Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky wrote 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 wrote in “Tyranny of the Minority,” 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 president at the time, is far and away the leading Republican candidate in 2024 polling.
He still refuses to acknowledge his loss to Joe Biden. Far from rejecting the Jan. 6 rioters, he has suggested that, if reelected, he would pardon some who have been convicted of violent crimes. Rather than distance himself from extremists, he welcomes them at his rallies and calls them patriots.
And Trump is now backed by many of the Republican leaders who f led for their lives and hid from the rioters, even some who had condemned him. Several top GOP leaders have endorsed his candidacy.
The support for Trump 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,” Levitsky told the Associated Press. “There’s no country in the world, no country on Earth in history, where the politicians abdicated democracy but the institutions held. People have to defend democracy.”
The third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack comes during the most convulsive period in U.S. politics in at least a generation, with Congress barely able to keep up with the basics of governing and the start of the presidential nominating contests just over a week away.
Trump’s persistent false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — which have been rejected in at least 60 court cases, by every state election certification and by the former president’s onetime attorney general — continue to animate the race as he eyes a rematch with President Biden.
Meanwhile, Trump faces 91 felony criminal charges in federal and state courts, including the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith that accused him of conspiring to defraud the U.S. over the election.
Biden, speaking Friday near Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge, recounted the events of Jan. 6, saying, “We nearly lost America — lost it all.”
Biden said Trump is 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,” the president said. “Now these MAGA voices — who know the truth about Trump and Jan. 6 — have abandoned the truth and abandoned the democracy.”
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.”
Raskin envisions a time when there will be a Capitol exhibit, and tours for visitors, to commemorate what happened Jan. 6, 2021.
Five people died during the riot and the immediate aftermath, including Trump supporter and rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police.
All told, some 140 police officers were injured in the siege, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who later died. Several others died by suicide in the following months.
One former Capitol Police officer, Harry Dunn, has announced that he is running for Congress to “ensure it never happens again.”
Trump’s decision to reject the results of the 2020 election was the only time Americans have not witnessed the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a hallmark of U.S. democracy.
A portrait of George Washington resigning his military commission hangs in the U.S. Capitol, a symbol of the voluntary relinquishing of power — a move that was considered breathtaking at the time. He later was elected the first U.S. president.
Trump opened the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign with a popular recording from the J6 Prison Choir: riot defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” recorded over a phone line from jail, interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
More than 1,200 people have been charged in the riot, with nearly 900 convicted, including leaders of the extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who are serving lengthy terms for seditious conspiracy.
Trump has called Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” and said there was much “love” at the “Stop the Steal” rally he held near the White House that day before encouraging the mob to march down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Allies of Trump scoff at the narrative of Jan. 6 that has emerged in the years since.
Attorney Mike Davis, a Trump ally sometimes mentioned as a potential attorney general, has mocked Democrats and others, saying they are turning Jan. 6 into a “religious holiday.”
Then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who went on to become House speaker, once called Jan. 6 the “saddest day” he ever had in Congress. But McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) retired last month and endorsed Trump for president. McCarthy said he would consider joining Trump’s Cabinet.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said he would back whoever becomes the Republican Party nominee, despite a scathing speech at the time of the insurrection in which he called Trump’s actions “disgraceful” and said the rioters “had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election.”
Asked about Trump’s second-term agenda, GOP lawmakers brushed off his admission that he would be a dictator on “Day One.”
“He’s joking,” said Trump ally Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.).
“Just bravado,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “There’s still checks and balances.”
Levitsky said that when he and Ziblatt wrote their 2018 book, they believed that the Republicans in Congress would be a “bulwark against Trump.”
However, he said, noting that many Trump detractors have retired or been voted out of office, “we were much less pessimistic than we are today.”