More than 1,100 people have been charged with crimes for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A handful of leaders have been sentenced to more than 10 years in prison, though as of March, only 58% of those sentenced had received prison time with a median sentence of 60 days. This looks like the justice system working as it ought to: A crime was committed in full view of the world and people have been charged and sentenced according to the level of their participation, with many avoiding prison entirely while leaders will serve serious time.
To Donald Trump, though, it’s a deep injustice. Trump opened his Thursday rally in Texas with the recording of the national anthem as sung by the “J6 Prison Choir”—a recording on which Trump recites the pledge of allegiance—then launched into an explanation of what the audience had just heard.
“Well, thank you very much, and you know what that was,” he said. “That was, I call them the ‘J6 hostages,’ not prisoners. I call them the hostages, what’s happened. And it’s a shame. And you know, they did that, and they asked me whether or not I would partake and do the beautiful words, and I said yes, I would, and you saw the spirit, the spirit was incredible.”
Yes, hostages. Hostages who were able to record and market a single, somehow.
It’s not known exactly who was on the recording that ended up being sold as a single, but The Washington Post looked into a video of inmates singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” that circulated around the time the single was released. Here’s what the newspaper could identify about those “hostages”:
Using physical characteristics and interviews with family members, supporters and attorneys, The Washington Post identified five of the roughly 15 men who are featured in the video. Four of them were charged with assaulting police, using weapons such as a crowbar, sticks and chemical spray, including against Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died the next day.
Those are not hostages. Those are alleged criminals who are receiving due process, and while conditions at the D.C. jail are horrific, the Jan. 6 defendants are in the less appalling part of the facility. This is not what it is to be a hostage.
Trump had more to say about the recording than that it was made by “hostages,” though.
And when that came out it went to the number one song. It was beating everybody. It beat Taylor Swift, it beat Miley Cyrus who was number one and two—they were number one and two. We knocked them off for a long time. That song was out there for a long time. Then of course they had a problem with the internet, right, you know? And so all of a sudden they said ‘Oh, there’s a problem, we’ll have to take it off’ and we raised hell and it went back on. That was up there for a long time. It was the number one record or song there was for … months.
The song went to number one on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart, but did not make the Billboard Hot 100, which is what people usually mean when they refer to a song going to number one. Digital song sales represent a tiny fraction of how songs get played these days—streaming racks up massively larger numbers. The J6 Prison Choir’s “Justice for All” got 33,000 paid downloads in its first week, which put it at number one. But it got 442,000 official U.S. streams, while the top streaming song that week got 38.9 million. “Politically based songs often register high No. 1 on iTunes, where it usually takes only a few thousand sales a day to command the chart,” Variety noted at the time. And the song did not top even that chart for months. It had a short burst of insurrection supporters buying it when it was released, and then it dropped quickly.
Donald Trump glorifying a single that includes his own voice is unsurprising. Of course that thing must have dominated the charts for months! But when he calls the Jan. 6 defendants hostages, he’s essentially denying that crimes were committed in the attack on the Capitol. That’s not a surprise, but it’s still a very frightening sign for a future in which he’s likely to again be the Republican nominee for president. If he loses in 2024, he’s telling us that he continues to support insurrection. If he doesn’t lose in 2024, he’s telling us how a second Trump term would run.
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