Back in power 5 years later, Trump has all but erased the stain of Jan. 6

Five years ago today, Donald Trump and a mob of his supporters urged Congress to do what voters and courts would not: Allow him to rule over a country whose people had rejected him.

Trump learned in the final days of his first term that the Constitution is riddled with ambiguities, loopholes and untested limits. And in the years since, he learned it’s nearly impossible to punish a president who decides to test them. In fact, he was rewarded with a second term and a powerful, Supreme Court-issued form of immunity from prosecution.

Trump 2.0 has been the expression of that lesson.

And those who rioted on Trump’s behalf learned a similar lesson. Within hours of retaking office, Trump mass pardoned the 1,500 people who stormed the Capitol in his name, including hundreds who assaulted police.

The federal judges who presided over their cases worried at the time that the most egregious perpetrators would see clemency as an endorsement of their violence. But perhaps even more acutely, they warned that an abrupt end to the Jan. 6 prosecutions would prevent the nation from ever reckoning with an even more troubling aspect of the attack: how hundreds of previously law-abiding citizens — many of whom served their country and overcame personal adversity — were duped by a lie about the 2020 election and goaded into joining the mob.

Those twin lessons suggest that Jan. 6 remains crucial to understanding Trump’s second presidency, as much as it helped define his first. The ethos of Trump’s second term was forged in the final days of his first.

A presidency unbound

As he did five years ago, Trump is surgically targeting the space between the lines of the Constitution, testing or blowing past limits that his predecessors didn’t dare to approach.

In rapid succession, Trump invoked emergency powers to impose unprecedented tariffs; challenged Congress’ power of the purse by slashing billions from foreign aid programs; deployed the National Guard to cities and states against the will of their leaders; used wartime authorities to deport hundreds without due process; and ordered lethal strikes against boats he says were carrying drugs to the U.S.

Each gambit, including last week’s operation to yank Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, required Trump to step across legally dubious boundaries. It’s a maximalist view of executive power, carried out with the bravado of a president who knows he’s out of the reach of prosecutors, lawmakers and courts who tried to punish him for threatening the transfer of power five years ago.

The collapse of accountability

Trump has spent the year trying to rebrand the prosecution of the Capitol attack, rather than the attack itself, as a “grave national injustice.” He has made common cause with the rioters and purged the investigators who sought to hold him — and the attackers — accountable.

Aiding that effort, nearly all of the state-level criminal cases against the Trump-led bid to overturn the 2020 election have crumbled. And Trump recently issued a second, sweeping pardon for anyone who aided his bid to subvert the 2020 election, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell.

It’s against that backdrop that Trump will mark his first Jan. 6 as president since the one that nearly turned him into a pariah.

“The media’s continued obsession with January 6 is one of the many reasons trust in the press is at historic lows — they aren’t covering issues that the American people actually care about,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, without noting Trump’s own continued social media messaging about Jan. 6, as recently as last month. “President Trump was resoundingly reelected to enact an agenda based on securing the border, driving down crime, and restarting our economy — the President is delivering.”

A reckoning cut short

In the weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, many judges worried that the impending pardon of Jan. 6 defendants would erase efforts to understand how ordinary, law-abiding citizens became foot soldiers in a mob, duped by powerful leaders who lied about the 2020 election results.

“I don’t know if we’ve done enough as a country to reflect on how that happened,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said at a December 2024 proceeding. His comments came as he sentenced Richard Markey to 30 months in prison for assaulting a police officer at the Capitol. The Obama-appointed judge wondered aloud how a man with no criminal history, a stable family life and reputation as a do-gooder could have found himself at the front lines of a misbegotten mob and “how people like Mr. Markey, for that moment in time, became somebody they’re not — loss of control, flashes of anger, desire to do violence.”

The story was similar for David Camden. After a troubled childhood with a drug-addicted father, Camden enlisted in the Army in 1997 and would go on to earn an honorable discharge. Along the way he became hooked on meth and spent years battling addiction and homelessness. Despite those challenges, Camden would check himself into rehab and a halfway house, earn a degree and a stable job. He’s been sober for 20 years and used his experience to become a prolific advocate for drug abuse treatment and rescuing animals.

But on Jan. 6, 2021, Camden joined the mob. He pushed police barricades, rallied rioters and deployed a fire extinguisher at police, persisting even after taking chemical spray to his face.

To U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, Camden’s case was “a tragedy.” “You pulled yourself out of this abyss,” she marveled at his Jan. 10, 2025, sentencing hearing, only to risk it all for a lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Cases like Markey’s and Camden’s were strikingly common: Many Jan. 6 defendants hit rock bottom at the height of the Covid pandemic, lost jobs and social connections, fell down social media rabbit holes and became susceptible to lies about election fraud. Often, they were military veterans with undertreated mental health issues. Some judges lamented the disproportionate number of veterans on their dockets.

The search for understanding ended abruptly with Trump’s mass pardon — which also shortened or altogether erased punishment for the most egregiously violent defendants and those who plotted to stop the transfer of power.

They include Julian Khater, who maced Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick a day before his death (ruled to be from natural causes); Ryan Nichols, who filmed himself en route to the Capitol warning lawmakers “we’re going to drag your fucking ass through the streets” before joining in a melee with police; Ryan Samsel, who ignited the earliest breach of police lines before unleashing a torrent of violence and threats across Capitol grounds; and David Dempsey, who hurled objects at police, swung poles, used pepper spray and more en route to a 20-year jail sentence.

There were the 18 seditious conspiracy convictions that Trump wiped away, mostly with commutations, for leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who strategically positioned themselves in the mob to help cause maximum mayhem — part of what juries agreed was a plot to violently stop the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes oversaw the stockpiling of firearms and equipment at an Arlington hotel — a “quick-reaction force” that his group was prepared to rush into Washington if the fighting escalated.

Members of the mob stalked the halls of the Capitol, sending lawmakers fleeing in terror, pursuing then-Vice President Mike Pence for refusing Trump’s call to overturn the election — the QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley left a menacing note on for Pence in the Senate chamber — ransacked Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, stealing her laptop in the process, and terrorized lawmakers and Hill staffers who feared they may not make it out alive. Many perpetrators carried weapons, like John Banuelos, who fired a gun in the air outside the Capitol, and Patrick McCaughey, who pinned D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, leading to an iconic image of the day’s hand-to-hand combat.

The fight to preserve history

In recent weeks, however, there have been small but persistent efforts to keep alive the reality of Jan. 6.

Members of the House’s former Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee, who aggressively investigated Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election, will reconvene in a session to highlight Trump’s role stoking the chaos.

Former special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 election, used his Dec. 17 deposition before a Republican-led House committee to lay blame for the chaos and violence of Jan. 6 at Trump’s feet. And Republicans repeatedly handed him a platform to lay out the evidence he amassed against Trump and express confidence he would’ve won a guilty verdict if the case ever went to trial.

“The case we would’ve presented at trial would’ve been Donald Trump preying on the party allegiance of people in his party,” Smith said, a refrain he returned to repeatedly in his daylong interview.

And despite their fitful effort, Democratic lawmakers and police suing Trump over his Jan. 6 actions are on the verge of a ruling that could determine whether their five-year-old lawsuits will make it to trial.

Criminal cases against some of Trump’s low- and mid-level 2020 allies are advancing anew in Nevada and Wisconsin, stemming from Trump’s bid to assemble false slates of presidential electors to stoke a legal controversy about the election results.

And the fortuitously timed arrest of a man alleged to have planted pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters on the evening of Jan. 5 has opened new avenues to discover details about how Jan. 6 unfolded. The discovery of those pipe bombs by Capitol Police diverted resources just as the mob breached barricades and surged toward the foot of the building.

Alexis Loeb, a former federal prosecutor who handled Jan. 6 cases, said it seems too soon to know how Jan. 6 will be remembered. “I don’t think it’s as simple as saying well, President Trump was partially immunized, he was reelected, everyone was pardoned or had their sentences commuted, it’s all been washed away.”

“The pardons couldn’t erase everything. There’s still the evidentiary record. The pardons aren’t the end of the story,” she said.