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On Monday, the victory of America's Insurrectionist-in-Chief in the 2024 presidential election was certified during a joint session of Congress. Four years after a broad-daylight effort to halt the peaceful transfer of power culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Donald Trump will soon take power again—this time with both the popular vote and a comfortable Electoral College triumph in hand. He has long said that pardoning members of the mob he sent to sack the Capitol that day was going to be one of his first orders of business, and the fact that it is effectively a fait accompli at this point should not obscure how wrong it is and how it will further undermine what remains of the rule of law in the United States.
Trump's years-long Orwellian disinformation campaign justifying the riot as legitimate political expression and lionizing the perpetrators as heroes suffering from unjust persecution succeeded in muddying what should have been crystal-clear waters. After getting wound up with one of Trump's patented speeches featuring a firehose of lies, non-sequiturs and bombast, thousands of brainwashed MAGA die-hards descended, lemming-like, on the United States Capitol Building, scaling the walls, roaming the halls and creating violent mayhem. Some of them were armed with guns, carried zip ties and had plans to capture and possibly kill members of Congress. Others likely believed they were along for some kind of twisted joyride and seemed to be having the time of their lives.
But no sentient person illicitly roaming the halls of Congress—while elected officials and their staffs ran for their lives and hid from them—could possibly have believed that what they were doing was acceptable or legal. Four rioters died or were killed at the scene, a U.S. Capitol Police officer lost his life the following day after sustaining injuries during the melee and several other officers committed suicide in the days and weeks that followed. One hundred forty other police officers were injured in the mayhem.
The mob got to within a few feet of the packed Senate chamber before it was evacuated, and if not for the intervention of Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, there could have been a bloodbath that altered the course of history. I would invite you to review this footage of Goodman's heroic confrontation with Trump's foot soldiers and ask yourself whether the perpetrators are deserving of a presidential pardon. If anything, the 1,101 people who have been sentenced in connection with the insurrection should be thankful that the cops weren't told to fire on them.
Far-right propagandists have spent years peddling false equivalency with the 2020 George Floyd protests, arguing that the insurrectionists were persecuted while their counterparts on the left were allowed to skate. But even if you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should have been more forcefully quelled, there is an obvious moral and legal distinction between looting a Target or illegally occupying public space and participating in an effort to overthrow the American system of constitutional democracy by hunting members of the House and Senate and deliberately and coercively halting the counting of electoral votes. Calling them "political prisoners," as Trump has done over and over again, is an Orwellian subversion of the term's plain meaning. A political prisoner is someone who has been unjustly persecuted for dissent, not a bunch of MAGAworld influencers and ditto heads who were literally caught on film illegally storming the seat of national power in an extra-judicial effort to keep their man in power.
The comparison also happens to be (this should not surprise you given the far-right's inability to accept basic facts about the world we unfortunately share with them) factually wrong. More than 17,000 people were arrested during the summer 2020 protests, and more of them have served actual jail time than the Capitol rioters. Importantly—and I can't emphasize this enough—this is in spite of the fact that none of them were seeking to murder the vice president of the United States. If you can't accept that trying to kill members of congress is worse than smashing a window at a Cheesecake Factory, I just don't know what to tell you.
The reason the pardons, if they happen, will be an outrage is that they will not be about mercy or human decency. They will represent Trump rewriting history in front of our eyes, pardoning people for the very crimes he called on them to carry out. There will be no apology. The pardons will be, instead, an invitation to a future catastrophe that has now been legitimized by the courts and the voters.
So don't be surprised if the guests show up early to Trump's autocratic party, bearing arms rather than gifts, and refusing to leave until they carry what remains of our democracy out of the house in Tupperware.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
