With His Post-January 6 Comeback, Trump May Have Normalised Coup Attempts

WASHINGTON ― Losing presidential candidates who in the past were limited to asking for recounts and filing lawsuits may now, thanks to Donald Trump, have a new tool at their disposal: attempting a coup to steal the election by force and intimidation.

Five years after inciting a violent attack on the US Capitol in a last-gasp effort to cling to power, Trump is now back in the White House, from where he has pardoned all those who participated in his insurrection, including the hundreds who assaulted police officers. For many, if not most Americans, the televised carnage of January 6, 2021, is a distant and apparently irrelevant memory.

“Trump did what he set out to do. He has fundamentally changed this country forever,” said Michael Fanone, a former Washington, DC, police officer who suffered a heart attack after an insurrectionist attacked him with a stun gun that day. “And the American people let him do it.”

Amanda Carpenter, a former Republican Senate aide and now a researcher for the group Protect Democracy, said Trump has actually turned history on its head and made it the official policy of the US government to lie about a day on which violence left 140 police officers injured and led to the deaths of five.

“Our government has not just normalised January 6, it has radicalised the events into a loyalty test for top government officials,” she said. “Willingness to rewrite the history of that day, namely by pardoning violent rioters who maimed and injured police officers, is part of the Trump administration’s basic operations system.”

Trump White House officials did not respond to HuffPost requests for comment.

Tuesday marks the first January 6 that Trump will be back in the White House since the one five years ago when he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and warned them they would lose their country if they did not “fight like hell.” No commemoration of the day is on his public schedule, and a meeting with House Republicans is to take place not at the Capitol, but at the Kennedy Center which Trump recently had named after himself.

Trump himself continues to lie on a near daily basis that he won the 2020 election, regardless of the venue. “The election was rigged in 2020,” he said at a Dec. 14 White House Christmas party.

In fact, Trump lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes overall, but by narrow margins in the key states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia. He began lying in the wee hours of Election Night, before all the votes were even counted, that he had actually won. In the coming weeks, after his lawsuits to overturn the results began failing for lack of evidence, Trump and his aides instead had his allies in a handful of states won by Democrat Joe Biden concoct fake Electoral College slates for his vice president, Mike Pence, to accept as legitimate when Congress met on Jan. 6 to certify the results.

American democracy was saved that day when Pence refused to go along with Trump’s demand that he award him a second term or, alternatively, send the election to the US House, where Trump likely would have won because of his strength in rural, low-population states.

Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor in charge of the fraud and conspiracy criminal case against Trump for his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, told lawmakers in testimony last month that the country is fortunate that Americans never learned what chaos might have unfolded had Pence gone along with Trump’s scheme.

“Well, thankfully, we don’t know,” said Smith, whose prosecution ended when the Department of Justice, following established protocol against prosecuting a sitting president, dismissed the case after Trump won back the White House in 2024.

“But I would say that he ― he and the other people who stood up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that,’ may have changed the course of history in terms of our country of having an election where someone took power in our country who didn’t actually win the election,” Smith said.

Previous vice presidents have had the opportunity to flout the rules in the way Trump had demanded of Pence but instead honored the will of the electorate.

In 1961, then-Vice President and Republican nominee Richard Nixon ― notwithstanding credible allegations of election fraud ― for the good of the country accepted the certified results and declared Democrat John F. Kennedy the winner.

In 2001, sitting Vice President Al Gore similarly accepted a controversial and divided Supreme Court ruling that ended his attempt to recount Florida ballots. He also certified the victory of Republican George W. Bush after losing Florida by 537 votes.

And a year ago, former Vice President Kamala Harris certified Trump’s victory rather than ginning up fake electoral slates for herself in key states and declaring herself president-elect.

“One of the ironies, obviously, is that a lot of Republicans wouldn’t have liked it if Kamala Harris had decided four years later which slates of electors to choose and which ones not to,” said Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff who, along with Pence and his family, had to take refuge when Trump turned his mob against Pence with an angry social media post.

Short said he is not sure why voters did not consider Trump’s actions that day an unforgivable offense and chose to return him to power, but that one big reason may have been that Biden was, in the end, certified the winner and took office on schedule.

Polling has shown that while Trump has persuaded his hardcore base that the insurrection was a justified protest against a “stolen” election, most Americans agree that it was an attempt to overturn an election that Trump had lost.

Short said he doubts that other presidents who lose reelection would be able to get away with repeating Trump’s playbook. “I don’t think it did create a precedent for others,” he said.

Erick Erickson, a conservative radio show host who was so outraged by the Jan. 6 assault that he called on police to “shoot the protestors” and later urged the Senate to convict Trump on his impeachment to prevent him from seeking office again, said he also is not worried about the future of democracy.

“I think democracy is fine,” he said. “But voters were offered two bad choices and picked what they thought was the least bad choice based on their self-interest. That is democracy in action.”

Police officers who defended the Capitol that day from Trump’s mob are less sure, pointing out that just five years later, some of the insurrectionists who committed the most violent crimes plan to march to mark the anniversary.

“If we allow the memory of January 6 to be fully hijacked by Donald Trump and MAGA, then yes, we will have normalized this kind of anti-democratic authoritarianism,” said Aquilino Gonnell, a former US Capitol Police sergeant who now works with the anti-Trump group Home of the Brave.

Harry Dunn, another former Capitol Police officer, said Trump supporters are trying to whitewash what happened. “History bends toward distortion when accountability is denied,” he said.

Fanone, though, said the fact that Trump is back in the White House suggests that the battle for accountability has already been lost: “As my kids would say, ‘We’re cooked.’”