'A Day of Love': How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

71% : Before launching into complaints about persecution and promises of retribution, the candidate placed his hand over his heart for the playing of what an announcer called "the No. 1 song" on iTunes and Amazon, featuring Trump "and the J6 Choir.
62% : Trump and the Prison ChoirPerhaps the moment when Trump and his allies fully embraced their alternate version of history came March 3, 2023, when a new song appeared on major streaming platforms.
60% : There was also a surprise video message of encouragement from Trump, who had recently announced his candidacy.
58% : Trump recorded his contribution at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, while the choir was recorded with a phone in the Washington jail.
58% : "Trump, it continued, "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 and calling them 'hostages.'
57% : But with his return to office, Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called "a day of love."
57% : The song, "Justice for All," featured Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while the men of the Patriot Wing, now billing themselves as the J6 Prison Choir, sang the national anthem.
56% : A part of the brand that, two months ago, helped Trump win election as the 47th president of the United States.
42% : "Shot, boom," Trump said.
41% : This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Trump to many of his faithful.
41% : Even though Trump has not specified whom he would pardon, many Jan. 6 participants are anticipating a general amnesty for everyone involved.
39% : What began as a strained attempt to absolve Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government.
39% : The story told by many of the indictments begins with a mixed-message speech delivered before the riot by Trump in a park near the White House.
39% : Floating the specter of a justice system prejudiced against conservatives, he questioned why "so many people are still in jail over January 6" when antifa and Black Lives Matter hadn't paid a price for the violent protests that followed the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
38% : And Trump -- whose Jan. 6 actions were now being investigated by the Justice Department and a bipartisan House select committee -- emerged in 2022 as their No. 1 sympathizer.
38% : Still, Trump continued to play "Justice for All" at rallies and at Mar-a-Lago, spread his rigged-election lie, drop intimations of false-flag conspiracies, refer to those who stormed the Capitol as patriots -- and, now, transformed the indictments into further fuel for his persecution narrative.
36% : By mid-2022, an NBC News poll found that fewer than half of Americans still considered Trump "solely" or "mainly" responsible for Jan. 6.
36% : After his meeting with the women, Trump donated $10,000 to Hughes' organization and told a conservative radio host that if he was elected, there would be full pardons and "an apology to many."
35% : She added: "The American people did not fall for the Left's fear mongering over January 6th."The Jan. 6 tale that Trump tells is its own kind of replacement theory, one that covers over the marble-hard facts the way a blue carpet will cover those tainted Capitol steps on Inauguration Day.
34% : By Dan Barry and Alan Feuer NYT News Service/Syndicate StoriesIn two weeks, Donald Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the U.S. Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office.
34% : And by morning, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., was claiming on the House floor that some rioters "were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa."
31% : The fog machine of conspiracy was turned up a few notches that fall, when the Fox Nation streaming service released "Patriot Purge," a three-part series in which Carlson expanded on his specious contention that the Capitol attack was a government plot to discredit Trump and persecute conservatives.
31% : "As the select committee began holding hearings in early June 2022, Trump used speeches and his social media platform, Truth Social, to clap back at the damaging evidence and testimony.
30% : At the same time, Trump's repeated vows to pardon those implicated in the Capitol riot, an act of erasure that would validate their claims of political persecution, has electrified the Jan. 6 community of families, defendants and felons.
29% : "In August 2023, Trump was indicted twice on charges of interfering with the 2020 election results: at the state level, for illegally seeking to overturn the results of the election in Georgia, which he had narrowly lost; and at the federal level, for conspiring to impede the Jan. 6 certification of Biden's election.
28% : Trump remained mostly silent in the weeks that followed.
26% : "Trump retired to the White House, where he watched the televised violence and ignored advice to tell the mob to leave.
26% : Soon after, Trump broke his monthslong silence about Jan. 6.
25% : It was as if McConnell, among other leading Republicans, had never publicly declared Trump responsible.
25% : Promises of PardonsOnce he takes office, Trump will be positioned to finish refashioning Jan. 6 as a modern Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
24% : Asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Trump accepts any responsibility for what unfolded Jan. 6, his spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the "political losers" who tried to derail his career and asserted that "the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day."
24% : For some supporters, though, Trump was not doing enough.
22% : In early May 2021, on the same day House Republicans stripped Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., of her leadership role for labeling Trump a threat to democracy, they used an Oversight Committee hearing to minimize the riot.
22% : But subsequent investigations demonstrated that it was his own military advisers, not Pelosi, who blocked the idea, concerned with both the optics of armed soldiers at a political protest and the possibility that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to place the troops under his direct command.
19% : Directly behind Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons.
19% : Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., questioned whether all of those rioters wearing Trump gear and shouting pro-Trump chants were truly Trump supporters, while Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., likened much of the trespassing to a "normal tourist visit.
18% : They told Trump that the defendants and their families felt abandoned by him, Kelly later recalled, and that some of the federal judges in Washington he had appointed were among the worst in their handling of Jan. 6 cases.

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