CNN
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At midnight on the chaotic and bloody day of January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump convened a mob in Washington and told them to “fight like hell,” it was hard to imagine that he would ever come close to the presidency again.
But on Monday, exactly four years after his supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, beat police officers and disrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, Congress certified another election. be reconvened to do so.
The democracy that Trump sought to desecrate will sanctify his return to power.
The joint session of Congress to count the electors from November’s victory will rekindle memories of the fear and chills felt by anyone who was in the Capitol four years ago.
The ceremony, which paves the way for Mr. Trump to be sworn in as the 47th president in two weeks, highlights an extraordinary moment in the country’s political history, with Mr. Trump more powerful and popular than ever before. That’s going to happen. A plurality of voters decided that he was the best choice to lead the country until January 2029, despite his terrible actions four years ago.
January 6, 2025 marks one of the most surprising political comebacks in American history and marks the inauguration of a new administration that will likely see the next president’s most extreme stress test of the Constitution ever. It will be.
It also highlights Democrats’ failure to convince voters that President Trump poses a deadly threat to the nation’s democracy and that they have answers to Americans’ economic struggles and immigration concerns. It will be.
The American people made a decision in November and elected Trump, despite the day of infamy he caused four years ago.
As President Trump’s victory is certified by Congress and his defeated opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, will preside, the former president attempts to whitewash what happened in one of America’s darkest events. The extraordinary efforts of , advocates, and conservative media organizations will pay off. history.
President Trump, through a torrent of misinformation, convinced millions of Americans of his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Despite hundreds of convictions in the courts, Republicans have recast the January 6 rioters as “tourists,” persecuted victims, and heroes. President Trump has promised to pardon those convicted in the attack. He launched his 2024 campaign with a recording of the national anthem by the “J6 Choir,” sung by prisoners jailed for their role in the riots. Then, January 6, 2021 was renamed “Beautiful Day” and “Love Day.”
It couldn’t be more misleading. The truth about January 6 was revealed in shocking detail by witnesses and law enforcement officials before the Congressional Select Committee at a time when the House of Representatives was still under Democratic control. “It was a massacre. It was chaos,” said Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards. Her testimony was interspersed with footage of her being knocked unconscious by Trump supporters, and she said she slipped on the blood of her colleagues. “I have no combat training. That day was a few hours of hand-to-hand combat,” Edwards said in June 2022.
As the incident unfolded, senators and congressmen ran for their lives, Trump’s supporters invaded the Senate chamber, and Secret Service agents arrested Mike Pence as the crowd chanted for him to be hanged. The then vice president was quickly evacuated to a safe location.
However, Trump defied his second impeachment on January 6, 2021, re-established his dominance over the Republican Party, and defeated democracy by winning subsequent elections despite multiple criminal charges. He avoided paying a significant political price for the attack. When he won a non-consecutive second term, he went from being a political deviant to becoming one of the most important figures in American history. In the process, he cleverly portrayed an attempt to judge his crimes as persecution, creating a political rallying effect. He will return to the White House as an even stronger leader after a Supreme Court ruling stemming from one of his cases gives the president virtual immunity for his official actions while in office. .
Most meaningfully, President Trump sends a timeless message that a president who refused to accept the results of a free and fair election and incited the attack on the Capitol is OK and can return to power. That’s going to happen.
But the process of certifying Trump’s election victory will also serve as a reaffirmation of democracy. And as one of their final acts in office, Biden and Harris are attempting to revive the tradition of smooth transitions between administrations rejected by President Trump.
Biden said Sunday that this was intentional.
“As you may be aware, I have reached out to ensure a smooth transition. We must return to the basic and normal transfer of power,” the president told reporters at the White House. Ta.
In a Washington Post op-ed published Sunday evening, he also warned of the dangers of forgetting what happened four years ago.
“There are constant efforts to rewrite and even erase the history of that day. To tell us that we did not see what we all saw with our own eyes. Concerns about it… To dismiss it as some kind of partisan obsession, to explain it away as protests that have gotten out of hand,” Biden wrote, without naming President Trump.
“And we should commit to remembering January 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as the day our democracy was tested and won. “Remember, nothing is guaranteed,” he continued, adding that he plans to invite his successor to the White House on the morning of January 20 to attend President Trump’s inauguration.
Unlike in 2020, the losers, this time Democrats, lied about election fraud, created an alternate slate of electors, and urged crowds to gather in Washington to protest false claims that the election was stolen. I haven’t called out to anyone.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, “He led an insurrection, but the people voted. Tomorrow, also on January 6th, our job is to carry out the will of the people.” , Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday’s “State of the Union.” Sunday. “This is a peaceful transition of power. So tomorrow, Democrats and Republicans will come together to certify the results…That’s what we’re going to do. That’s what America has been doing. That is what we will do on Inauguration Day.”
The electoral certification of Trump’s victory will be a bittersweet moment for Democrats. And they failed to field a candidate in 2024 to defeat a former president who twice was impeached, four times prosecuted, and once convicted of trying to burn down democracy to stay in power. This will highlight the painful reality of the party.
If the core purpose of Biden’s 2020 campaign was to remove Trump from American politics, then his presidency would have been a failure, even if his other accomplishments made him shine. It will be. Mr. Biden’s decision to run for re-election, which ended in a disastrous CNN debate that exposed the cruel reality of diminished capacity, contributed to the Democratic Party’s failure. And Harris’ failure to make a convincing case for how to help Americans in a time of high prices and economic uncertainty opened the door for Trump to return to the Oval Office. She never distanced herself sufficiently from the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border or from claims that the inflation crisis was merely a “temporary phenomenon.”
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that voters didn’t ignore what happened on January 6, 2021, but rather what matters most to them. He stated that he had made a judgment. “I’m not saying the American people ignored this. They just had a different view of what was in their best interests, economically and otherwise,” the California Democrat said.
With his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump has managed to paint his turbulent presidency as a kind of lost golden age, even as he conjured up scenes of violence and lawlessness at its end.
There is no doubt that the country has moved to the right in the 2024 election, even in many blue-leaning districts and cities, toward President Trump’s populist nationalism. Trump won all seven battleground states, making him the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, although he fell just short of a majority. His claims of a historic mission are overstated, but his pledges to use his power to launch mass deportations of illegal immigrants, take revenge on political opponents and attempt to crack down on the media are unlikely to be thwarted. Republicans currently control both the House and Senate and will have the backstop of an often-favored majority of Supreme Court justices.
Trump’s victory has left Democrats adrift, searching for a new message and wondering how to reconnect with working Americans. And the party faces the reality that many voters would rather have a former president who tried to destroy democracy to stay in power than a candidate. It appears that enough voters have decided that they would prefer a strongman who can better voice their grievances to an alternative that President Trump warns is a threat to democracy.
Having warned of President Trump’s threat to constitutional values, Democrats have positioned themselves to defend a government and system that many Americans have lost faith in after years of foreign wars and the hollowing out of the blue-collar industrial economy. I realized that we were there.
This sense of the end of an ancient regime was reflected on Saturday when Biden launched his latest post-election attack on Trump. He awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to recipients who many Democrats see as embodying the democratic order that President Trump rejects. Among them was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. Mr. Biden also said that his son, a vaccine skeptic, had broken with Democrats and his family, and that Mr. Trump’s controversial choice to lead the health system, the assassinated former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, had died. admitted. and the human resources department. He also awarded the medal to former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a Republican and the late father of former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, one of President Trump’s last and most prominent critics within the Republican Party. was awarded.
After the ceremony, Biden hinted that the fight to save democracy would continue despite President Trump’s impending arrival in the White House. “Remember, our divine endeavor continues, and as my mother says, in order to continue moving forward, we must continue to have faith,” he said.
However, the party, which once prided itself on protecting democracy around the world, has long since profited from denying the events of January 6, 2021, and moved on, leading to a Republican takeover of power. Contributed.
In a narrow victory Friday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson won a narrow House majority to push ahead with President Trump’s ambitious policies of tough immigration enforcement, tax cuts, and a reduction in the size of the federal government, despite a small House majority. The foundation has already been laid.
Mr. Johnson also changed his mind about the urgency of preserving the certification of electoral votes.
Four years ago, he was a central figure in President Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election. Even after the bloody riot, Louisiana Republicans voted against awarding electoral votes to Biden in Pennsylvania and Arizona, based on false claims of election fraud.
But now, he says, nothing should stop him from celebrating Trump’s victory.
“There’s a heavy snowfall coming to Washington, D.C., and I encourage all of my colleagues to stay here and not leave town. Because, as you know, the Electoral Counting Act requires that we do this on January 6th at 1 p.m. Because we mandate it. Snowstorm or not, we’re going to make sure this gets done,” he told Fox News on Sunday.
“We cannot delay that recognition.”
