Campaign Roundup: The Third Anniversary of the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The story of that day is seemingly simple. A president insisted against all available evidence that the election had been stolen from him. He egged on his supporters with his grievances. Whether he intended it or not, some of those supporters responded by ransacking the Capitol. More than forty minutes after the mob overwhelmed police lines, he tweeted how his vice president “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Only after the president’s staff repeatedly begged him to act did he call on the mob to stop. History may be fairly described as “an argument without end,” but some facts seem to be incontrovertible.

But apparently they aren’t. Polls show that as many as two out of three Republicans continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. This belief not only persists but has grown over the past three years. This has been the case even though the claim has been repeatedly debunked by election experts, Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, has called the claim “bulls---,” and some of the claim’s most fervent promoters have acknowledged in court that they knew it to be false.

Attitudes toward what happened on January 6 have similarly softened over time. The percentage of Americans who say that Trump “bears a lot of blame” for January 6 has fallen, and Americans are increasingly willing to dismiss the significance of what the January 6 rioters did. Two weeks after the attack on the Capitol, 70 percent of Americans saw them as “criminals.” Today, just 48 percent do. This softening has occurred despite what people witnessed on January 6, the horrifying testimonials of those who fought the mob that day or were its target, the results of a congressional investigation, more than 1,200 arrests, some 710 guilty pleas, and hundreds of trials and convictions, including some for seditious conspiracy.

Perhaps even more troubling is the growing number of Americans who believe that the government provoked January 6. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll out this week found that a quarter of all Americans, including 44 percent of Trump voters, 34 percent of all Republicans, and 30 percent of Independents think that “FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack on the U.S. Capitol.” Just as remarkable, 33 percent of Trump voters, 34 percent of all Republicans, and 22 percent of Independents say they are “not sure.” It should be needless to say but it needs saying nonetheless—no credible evidence has been produced to substantiate this conspiracy theory. Instead, the claims that have been made have been knocked down time and again.

It’s hard to say how we got from January 6 to here. In the first days after the attack, leading Republicans rightly joined with Democrats in calling it a desecration of American democracy. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” Then-House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy called on Trump to "accept his share of responsibility" for the mob's violence. Republican Senator Marco Rubio called the sack of the Capitol: “inexcusable,” “disgusting,” “unpatriotic,” and “anti-American anarchy.”

Three years later, Trump calls January 6 a “beautiful day” and insists that those convicted of attacking the Capitol are “hostages.” Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is openly and repeatedly suggesting, again without providing credible evidence, that “Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job." 

None of this speaks well of the health of American democracy.

Campaign Update

Late last month, Maine became the second state to bar Trump from the ballot. Whereas the earlier Colorado ruling was made by the state’s highest court, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows made the decision for Maine. She acknowledged the significance of her ruling in her opinion: 

I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection. The oath I swore to uphold the Constitution comes first above all.

On Wednesday, Trump filed lawsuits to overturn the Colorado and Maine rulings. In the Colorado case, he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, noting that the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision marked “the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.” In the Maine case, Trump filed suit in state court because he has to exhaust all of his legal options in the state before he can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump’s suit in Maine challenges Bellows’s impartiality and contends that she followed “a process infected by bias and pervasive lack of due process.” 

While efforts are underway in more than a dozen states to bar Trump from the ballot based on the argument that he is ineligible under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, his Republican rivals have come to his defense. Nikki Haley, who some polls show is gaining ground in Iowa, argued after the Colorado ruling that “we don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions." (For good measure, the former South Carolina governor said that if she is elected president and Trump is convicted of a federal crime that she would pardon him “in the best interest of the country.”) Chris Christie argued that the effort to keep Trump off the ballot just “makes him a martyr.” Vivek Ramaswamy pledged to take his name off the ballot in every state that bars Trump from the ballot and called on his Republican rivals to do likewise.

CNN will host a debate next Wednesday night featuring Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Trump also qualified for the debate, which will be held just five days before the Iowa caucuses. As with all the prior Republican debates, he will be skipping this one. He instead plans to participate in a town hall in Des Moines that Fox News will carry. Ramaswamy, who qualified for the previous debates, did not make the cut for the CNN debate. He is none too happy about that. He is countering with a town hall meeting of his own in Des Moines, this one with a podcaster.

The Candidates in Their Own Words

DeSantis and Haley both participated in town halls on CNN last night. DeSantis’s appearance covered mostly domestic issues, though he did defend his pledge to order the use of deadly force against drug traffickers crossing the U.S. southern border and vowed to solve the border problem “once and for all.” Haley was asked more questions about foreign policy. She said that she planned “to be tough on China” and to “tell them we're going to end all normal trade relations with them until they stop murdering Americans with fentanyl." When asked about Ukraine, she said:

I don't think we need to put troops on the ground in Ukraine... But I think we need to give them the equipment and the ammunition to win... Russia said once they take Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. Those are NATO countries, and that puts America at war. This is about preventing war... Supporting Ukraine is actually preventing war.

Haley was equally emphatic about her support for Israel: "We have got to do three things when it comes to Israel. We need to give them whatever they need whenever they need it. We feed to eliminate Hamas. Finish them, so they can never do this horrific stuff again. And we need to do whatever it takes to bring our hostages home."

Trump and DeSantis both had op-eds in Wednesday’s Des Moines Register laying out their plans for regulating immigration and securing America’s borders. Trump claimed that his administration had produced “the most secure border in U.S history.” He went on to add:

On my first day back in office, I will terminate every open borders policy of the Biden administration and immediately restore the full set of strong Trump border policies.

Then, we will begin a record-setting deportation operation. Joe Biden has given us no choice. The millions of illegal aliens who have invaded under Biden require a record number of removals. This is just common sense.

DeSantis was equally blunt about his plans:

On day one of my presidency, I will declare a national emergency and shut down all illegal entries. Phony asylum claims aimed at bypassing proper immigration processes will no longer be entertained. I will end the abuse of parole authority being used to usher in thousands of illegal immigrants monthly. And I will fully empower Border Patrol and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport those with no legitimate right to be here.

But he didn’t stop there. He also took a shot at Trump for failing to deliver on what he promised on the campaign trail back in 2016: “I will build the wall, and I will make Mexico pay for it. Donald Trump promised this, and not only failed to deliver on this promise, but has now backed away from the promise altogether.”

Perhaps concerned that Haley may be picking up momentum, Trump aired a thirty-second campaign ad in New Hampshire attacking the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for being weak on immigration.

The punchline: “Haley's weakness puts us in grave danger. Trump's strength protects us."

Ramaswamy used an appearance on Tucker Carlson Uncensored to argue that the same people helping fund Biden’s campaign are underwriting Haley’s campaign as a way to derail the Trump campaign. The biotech entrepreneur accused Haley of being a “puppet” and “trojan horse” whose backers were looking to “prop Nikki Haley up to just waltz straight in to keep the war machine humming and to effectively keep the censorship-industrial complex and the administrative state intact exactly where it was in the post-9/11 Bush-Cheney era.”

When Politico asked for a response, the Haley campaign pointed to an interview that Haley did with Fox News on New Year’s Day asserting: “The last thing I want is for America to be at war. Supporting Ukraine with weapons is about preventing war. Joe Biden needs to do a better job explaining why a win for Russia is a win for China and Iran.”

What the Pundits Are Saying

The Washington Post explored how Nikki Haley turned around her family’s finances after stepping down as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, “making millions from private consulting, paid speeches and spots on corporate boards.” 

The New York Times did a deep dive into why DeSantis’s candidacy has failed to catch on, noting that by the time of the Iowa caucuses, the DeSantis campaign is on pace to spend significantly more on private jets—the governor’s preferred mode of travel—than on airing television ads.”

Michael Hirsch argued in Politico that “the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war….Such a negotiation would likely mean giving up parts of Ukraine to Russia.”

Politico’s Gavin Bade examined how Biden’s efforts to build a worker-centric trade policy are running aground. “The chief reason: Biden has failed to sell his self-styled ‘worker-centered’ trade policy to key members of his own party, stoking fears of a backlash at the ballot box from the very workers the president and fellow Democrats are courting.” In short, politics.

Leslie Vinjamuri wrote in Foreign Policy that “Washington’s partners and allies are alarmed by the possibility that Donald Trump could return to the White House, and they are ill-prepared to confront the prospect of a world unmoored from U.S. power and leadership.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder argued in Politico that while “foreign policy doesn’t usually affect electoral politics and outcomes in the U.S.,” crises over Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan could “pose a significant challenge to Biden’s electoral prospects.”

An AP-NORC poll released this week showed that foreign policy is weighing more heavily on Americans at the start of 2024. When asked to name up to five issues they want the U.S. government to work on this year, 38 percent mentioned foreign policy. That is up from 18 percent a year ago.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, and CISA senior election security adviser Cait Conley wrote in Foreign Affairs this week that the malicious use of generative artificial intelligence “is poised to test the security of the United States’ electoral process by giving nefarious actors intent on undermining American democracy—including China, Iran, and Russia—the ability to supercharge their tactics. Specifically, generative AI will amplify cybersecurity risks and make it easier, faster, and cheaper to flood the country with fake content.”

Democrats on the U.S. House Oversight Committee released a report contending that Trump’s businesses received at least “$7.8 million in payments from the foreign governments and officials of 20 countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Campaign Schedule

The Iowa caucuses, the first nominating event on the election calendar, are ten days away (January 15, 2024).

The South Carolina primary, the first Democratic primary, is twenty-nine days away (February 3, 2024).

Election Day is 305 days away.

Sinet Adous and Michelle Kurilla assisted in the preparation of this post.