A pardoned former Proud Boy leader led a march to the U.S. Capitol. Democrats gathered to decry the storming of the American seat of government on Jan. 6, 2021. The White House unveiled a new website declaring “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection.”
The five-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot saw the Trump administration and Democrats present two very different accounts of that momentous day, which led to both a House impeachment and a federal criminal indictment of a former president.
Tuesday's partisan split screen highlighted the starkly different narratives that have formed around Jan. 6 in the years since a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try and prevent the certification of Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Among Trump’s first acts in office after he was inaugurated to begin a second term following his 2024 election victory was to pardon nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants, a fact the Trump administration highlighted in a new Jan. 6 page on the White House website.
“President Trump took decisive action to pardon January 6 defendants who were unfairly targeted, overcharged, and used as political examples,” the page begins, before continuing with a selected timeline of events that day, video of Trump’s speech before the riot, links to government reports about Jan. 6 and other material.
