Dictatorships tend to consolidate their power very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that a population may not fully comprehend the magnitude of what has happened to their society. This “shock and awe” is employed to underscore—as immediately as possible—the dictator’s power and to intimidate opposition by convincing people to believe that opposition is futile.
In the United States, Donald Trump has freely acknowledged his intent to become a dictator on “Day One” if he is reelected. On March 12, Trump confirmed via his social media site Truth Social that he would free the Jan. 6 criminals as one of three discrete “first acts” of his presidency:
The social and political implications of such an unprecedented release of hundreds of convicted criminals back into American society has (thus far) been largely ignored by U.S. media (perhaps because its grown numb to Trump’s increasingly extreme rhetoric). However, there is no reason not to take Trump at his word on this.
RELATED STORY: House Republicans release another report defending Trump’s attempted coup
The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is the most vivid, indelible reminder of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. It is the genesis of the most serious criminal charges currently levied against him. Most importantly, unlike the other offenses for which he is currently charged, it elicited a shocking, visual, public record of the actual, real-world consequences of his behavior.
Trump and his supporters know this full well. Objecting to the prosecution and incarceration of the persons involved in carrying out the violent attacks of Jan. 6—and minimizing what occurred—has become a cause célèbre among several individuals in the Republican Party, most notably among Trump’s most rabid base of support. As reported by PBS, during the first rally of his 2024 political campaign, Trump extolled the virtue of those who had committed acts of violence at the Capitol, playing a song titled “Justice for All,” sung by several of those imprisoned for Jan. 6. That rally also featured film clips celebrating scenes from the insurrection. During his speech Trump told those who had been criminally charged and convicted for their participation in the attempted insurrection, “You will be vindicated.” He has since declared he will free these insurrectionists several times, but his recent missive on Truth Social is the first to suggest it will be one of his top priorities.
But it is Trump himself who desperately wants vindication. Pardoning the Jan. 6 criminals provides him with an irresistible opportunity to obtain that by demonstrating his power, “owning” his political enemies while at the same time rebuking the criminal justice system that currently places him in jeopardy. Presumably Trump intends to wield his constitutionally authorized right to pardon individuals convicted of federal crimes in order to “free” the Jan. 6 arrestees and convicted criminals. And he’ll do this in the same insouciant manner as he exercised the pardon power at the end of his prior term in office to free convicted criminals such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Charles Kushner.
The real-world implications of abusing the pardon power in this manner are meaningless to Trump. But they won’t be meaningless for the rest of us.
According to the United States’ Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, as of March 6, 2024, over 1,358 persons had been charged in connection with their involvement in the attacks that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Of those individuals, “approximately 486 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 127 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”
As the U.S. Attorney’s Office notes, approximately 769 individuals have pleaded guilty to various federal charges, with approximately 238 pleading to felonies and 95 of those pleading to assaults on law enforcement officers. A bipartisan report of the U.S. Senate found that at least seven people had died in or as a result of the attacks, with multiple police suicides later attributed to injuries sustained during the insurrection. Subsequent to that report’s issuance, two additional Metropolitan Police officers also committed suicide.
The initial breach of the Capitol complex is shown in the video clip, below.
A few of the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 attacks were motivated simply by the unprecedented opportunity afforded to them to act out on their violent, right-wing, militia-inspired fantasies. As noted by the Center for Policy & Research at Seton Hall University, in a study of those individuals prosecuted in the first year after the attacks, roughly one in five had prior criminal records or histories of committing violence. Several of these had prior arrests, restraining orders, or convictions for rape and assault. Some could fairly be characterized as serial violent offenders. And some who were permitted pre-trial release have proceeded to commit additional violent crimes even before their trials for the Jan. 6 attacks began.
Many of the individuals charged in Trump’s insurrection received moderate to lengthy jail terms based, in part, on their prior records involving violent attacks on people. This is in accordance with standard policies followed by prosecutors in assessing their sentence recommendations. A blanket Trump pardon of the Jan. 6 defendants would serve to repudiate the considered view of lay juries, prosecutors, and judges. It would say that the acts these defendants did, in fact, warrant enhanced punishment under the law, effectively mooting the legal impact of their sentences as prescribed as a tool for preserving social order. As a purely practical matter, those sentences were imposed—many believe too leniently—specifically for the purpose of deterring the commission of further violent crimes against individual persons and the public at large.
A pardon of the Jan. 6 defendants, however, would have the exact opposite effect: It would normalize—even legitimize—the violence that occurred that day. Referring to them collectively as “hostages,” as Trump has done, makes it difficult if not impossible to justify pardoning some, but not all of them. This clip from Washington, D.C., CBS affiliate WUSA9 is among hundreds of similar videos depicting the type of violence these defendants committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021:
How exactly would Trump go about determining which of these individuals who were eventually incarcerated for violent or aggravated offenses deserves some type of “clemency?” The short answer is that there is no way to do so short of Trump appointing himself judge and jury. That is a far cry from justifying pardons based on a specific category of criminal violation, such as the simple possession of marijuana, for example.
But practical considerations aside, freeing these individuals would quite simply be a massive slap in the face to the American criminal justice system. And that is specifically the multi-year efforts of police departments, the FBI, and federal prosecutors who expended public resources to bring these criminals to justice. It would be an emphatic middle finger directed at law enforcement who were the only thing standing in the way of Trump’s mob that day. It would also be a corrosive slap in the face to the citizens of this country who rightly expect the law to be carried out fairly. And most of all, it would send a unequivocal signal that anyone who commits a criminal offense of any type in Trump’s name will not face any significant pushback from the law. It would invite, even encourage further crimes to be committed with impunity by Trump’s criminally minded supporters to satisfy Trump’s desire for revenge against his detractors.
We have already seen what this might mean in terms of domestic terrorism. The threats against judges and court staff overseeing Trump’s civil and criminal trials, the threats against election workers, elected officials, and even volunteers involved in routine election matters who Trump’s supporters see as his political enemies have now grown so routine that they barely warrant a mention in the press. The lies sown by Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party since Jan. 6 have fostered an environment where “serious threats” to federal judges have more than doubled since 2021. Collectively, members of Congress, as well as “judges, attorneys, jurors, and others who are protected by the U.S. Marshals Service” have been literally deluged with thousands of these threats since the 2020 election.
Most of these threats have been anonymous, and to that end the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists have kept these types of domestic terrorists in the shadows. Should those involved in carrying out the insurrection be allowed to go free, essentially rewarded for their crimes, those types of threats are likely to explode exponentially, and many of them will certainly be acted upon.
But probably the most ominous aspect of Trump’s vow to release the Jan. 6 perpetrators is the fact that several of them were tied directly to the Trump campaign apparatus from the start. They purportedly acted the putative role of foot soldiers, or “Brownshirts” to the Trump effort (the Proud Boys served as Roger Stone’s “security” during the event) and were instrumental in conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election on his behalf by use of force. Those were the ones who received the harshest sentences.
As noted by Michael Ricciardelli of Seton Hall University:
Conspiracies were the most serious offenses, with two different forms of conspiracies: seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct the certification of an election. The conspirators were largely populated by two major groups—the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. The Oath Keepers were virtually exclusively Conspirators, either seditious or conspiracy to obstruct, while virtually all other conspirators were members of the Proud Boys or Three Percenters.
Those individuals, including Oath Keeper leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, head of the Proud Boys organization, are among those who Trump promises to release. As reported by Brandi Buchman, writing for Law and Crime:
Rhodes was tried and convicted on seditious conspiracy charges along with a handful of other members in the organization in November 2022. Rhodes was unrepentant at trial, and at his sentencing last May he deemed himself a “political prisoner” who “like Donald Trump only committed the crime of opposing those who are destroying our country.”
Rhodes is now serving a sentence of 18 years. The leader of the Proud Boys, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was also convicted of seditious conspiracy and is serving a sentence of 22 years, the longest yet doled out to any Jan. 6 defendant.
There is no reason to believe any of these individuals would behave any differently should they be released back into society after receiving a pardon for their federal crimes. There is every reason to believe they will resume their roles, encouraged and emboldened by Trump’s vowed action to free them of any accountability. What that would mean for the rest of the country—and most particularly those who Trump considers to be his political enemies or opponents—should be as obvious as it is terrifying.
RELATED STORY: Trump’s allies have big plans to turn America into a fascist theocracy
Campaign Action
