Three years after a mob of thousands broke through barriers, smashed windows and trampled police to storm the seat of American democracy in a failed effort to keep Donald Trump in power, the man whose persistent lies fuelled the attack remains the Republican party’s leading candidate for the presidency.
While the former president pledges to pardon the hundreds of defendants charged in connection with the violent assault at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, President Joe Biden is approaching the three-year anniversary of the attack to warn Americans that his rival’s antidemocratic threats have not abated, and that the stakes of the 2024 election just months away could not be greater.
On Friday, the president will deliver remarks near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and the Continental Army endured a brutal winter during the American Revolution.
His speech to mark the anniversary of January 6 in a critical swing state will aim to “make the case directly that democracy and freedom remains central to the fight we’re in today,” according to deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks.
Mr Trump’s threat to American democracy “has only grown more dire in the years since,” according to campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez.
The frontrunner for the GOP’s nomination for president is demanding the release of defendants he calls “hostages” and “patriots” and vows to issue “full pardons” on “day one” with “an apology for many.” The political action committee supporting his campaign gave thousands of dollars to a group that financially supports January 6 defendants.
He has also embraced the “J6 Prison Choir”, a group of defendants who remain in a Washington DC jail for crimes that, according to federal prosecutors, “were so violent that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public”.
Mr Trump, who is criminally accused of leading a conspiracy to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in a mob he failed to stop, “has financially supported and celebrated these offenders – many of whom assaulted law enforcement on January 6 – by promoting and playing their recording of the National Anthem at political rallies,” prosecutors wrote in a recent court filing.
His campaign of retribution and violence casts himself as a victim of political persecution, framing the criminal cases and lawsuits against him as part of a Joe Biden-led conspiracy to keep him out of the White House, an extension of the same false narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from and “rigged” against him.
Rioters and their attorneys have repeatedly blamed the former president’s “fight like hell” rhetoric and calls to march to the Capitol for their actions and have expressed their regrets in tearful courtroom hearings.
Yet recent polling found that Republican voters are more likely to support January 6 defendants and less likely to blame Mr Trump than they were two years ago, while conspiracy theories and rampant misinformation surrounding the attack continue to shape how one-quarter of Americans feel about it.
More than 3,000 people broke through the Capitol on January 6, and roughly 1,200 people have been arrested and charged. Prosecutors have two more years to find the other 1,800 rioters before a statute of limitation expires.
Mr Biden has repeatedly centred Mr Trump’s autocratic threats and a rising tide of authoritarianism in his campaign to “restore the soul of America,” promising protections for voting rights and civil liberties and the restoration of the US as a global democratic leader.
He marked the first anniversary of the attack with remarks outside the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, where “those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated this incident held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy,” he said.
In September 2022, weeks before midterm elections, he warned that the “Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”
Last year, on the attack’s second anniversary, he awarded presidential medals to “individuals who made exemplary contributions to our democracy surrounding January 6” and “who “demonstrated courage and selflessness during a moment of peril for our nation”.
A 60-second ad running on television marks in several key states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – features the president’s revived warning that “there’s something dangerous happening in America.”
“There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy,” he says in the ad over images of neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia and rioters clashing with police outside the Capitol. “All of us are being asked right now: what will we do to maintain our democracy?”
