Late on a day of chaos and blood on January 6, 2021, it was unimaginable that Donald Trump \u2014 who summoned a mob to Washington and told the crowd to \u201cfight like hell\u201d \u2014 would get anywhere near the presidency again. <\/p>\n
Yet on Monday, exactly four years after his supporters invaded the US Capitol, beat up police officers and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden\u2019s 2020 victory, Congress convened to again confirm another election. <\/p>\n
The democracy that Trump tried to desecrate has enshrined his return to power. <\/p>\n
A joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes from his November victory rekindled chilling memories of the horror and fear felt by anyone who was in the US Capitol four years ago. <\/p>\n
The ceremonial process clearing the way for Trump\u2019s swearing in as the 47th president in two weeks also highlighted an extraordinary moment in political history in a nation where Trump is more powerful and popular than he\u2019s ever been. A plurality of voters decided that despite his egregious conduct four years ago, he was the best option to lead the country until January 2029. <\/p>\n
January 6, 2025, marks the most stunning political comeback in US history, and ushers in a new administration that could feature the president-elect\u2019s most extreme stress test of the Constitution so far. <\/p>\n
It also underscores the Democratic Party\u2019s failures in convincing voters that Trump represents a mortal threat to the country\u2019s democracy and that they had the answers to Americans\u2019 economic struggles and concerns over immigration. <\/p>\n
Americans made a choice in November, and even though he conjured a day of infamy four years ago, they picked Trump. <\/p>\n
The congressional certification of Trump\u2019s victory \u2014 over which his vanquished opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, presided \u2014 rewards an extraordinary effort by the ex-president, his supporters and the conservative media machine to whitewash what happened on one of the darkest days in US history. <\/p>\n
Trump, with a storm of misinformation, has convinced millions of Americans of his lie about the 2020 election being stolen. Republicans have rebranded the January 6 rioters as \u201ctourists,\u201d persecuted victims and heroes, despite the hundreds of convictions handed down by courts. Trump has promised to pardon those found guilty over the attack. He launched his 2024 campaign with a recording of the National Anthem by the \u201cJ6 choir,\u201d sung by prisoners jailed for their role in the riot. And he rebranded January 6, 2021, a \u201cbeautiful day\u201d and a \u201cday of love.\u201d <\/p>\n
This could hardly be more misleading. The truth of January 6 was told in shocking details by witnesses and law enforcement officers to a congressional select committee when the House was still under Democratic control. \u201cIt was carnage. It was chaos,\u201d said Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer whose testimony was interspersed with footage of her being knocked unconscious by Trump\u2019s supporters and who described slipping on the spilled blood of her colleagues. \u201cI am not combat trained, and on that day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat,\u201d Edwards said in June 2022. <\/p>\n
While this was unfolding, senators and representatives were running for their lives, Trump\u2019s supporters breached the Senate chamber and Secret Service agents hustled then-Vice President Mike Pence to safety as the crowd chanted for him to be hanged. <\/p>\n
But by shrugging off his second impeachment over January 6, 2021, reestablishing his dominance over the GOP and winning a subsequent election despite multiple criminal indictments, Trump avoided paying a meaningful political price for his assault on democracy. When he won a nonconsecutive second term, he went from being a political aberration to one of the most significant figures in American history. Along the way, he skillfully portrayed attempts to bring him to justice for his transgressions as persecution, creating a political rallying effect. He\u2019ll return to the White House as an even more powerful leader, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling arising from one of his legal cases that gives the president substantial criminal immunity for official acts committed while in office. <\/p>\n
Most profoundly, Trump will send a message down through the ages that a president who refuses to accept the result of a free and fair election and who incites an attack on the Capitol can get away with it \u2014 and regain power. <\/p>\n
Yet, the process of certifying Trump\u2019s election win was also<\/strong> a <\/strong>reaffirmation of democracy. And Biden and Harris, in one of their final acts in office, are restoring a tradition of smooth handoffs between administrations denied to them by Trump. <\/p>\n Biden said Sunday this had been deliberate. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you notice, I\u2019ve reached out to, to make sure the smooth transition. We\u2019ve got to get back to the basic, normal transfer of power,\u201d the president told reporters at the White House. <\/p>\n In a Washington Post op-ed published Sunday evening, he also warned of the dangers of forgetting what happened four years ago. <\/p>\n \u201cAn unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite \u2014 even erase \u2014 the history of that day. To tell us we didn\u2019t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand,\u201d Biden wrote without naming Trump. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd we should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy \u2014 even in America \u2014 is never guaranteed,\u201d he continued, adding that he has invited his successor to the White House on the morning of January 20 and that he will be attending Trump\u2019s inauguration. <\/p>\n Unlike in 2020, the losers \u2014 this time, the Democrats \u2014 have not lied about election fraud, drawn up alternative slates of electors or called for a crowd to come to Washington to protest false claims of a stolen election. <\/p>\n The electoral certification of Trump\u2019s win is a bitter moment for Democrats. And it highlights the party\u2019s painful reality that it couldn\u2019t produce a candidate in 2024 to beat a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted ex-president who tried to burn down democracy to stay in power. <\/p>\n Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview on CBS\u2019 \u201cFace the Nation\u201d on Sunday that voters hadn\u2019t ignored what happened on January 6, 2021, but had made a judgment on what was most important to them. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say that the American people disregarded this. They just had a different view as to what was in their interest, economically and the rest,\u201d the California Democrat said. <\/p>\n Trump, with his searing anti-immigration rhetoric, succeeded in painting his chaotic presidency as a kind of lost golden age, despite the scenes of violence and lawlessness that he conjured at its end.<\/em> <\/p>\n The country indisputably took a step to the right in the 2024 election, toward Trump\u2019s populist nationalism, even in many blue-leaning districts and cities. Trump won all seven swing states and became the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote, even if he fell marginally below a majority of votes cast. His claims of a historic mandate are exaggerated, but that\u2019s unlikely to thwart his promise to use power to mount a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, wreak revenge on his political enemies and attempt a crackdown on the media. Republicans now control both the House and the Senate and will have the backstop of an often-supportive Supreme Court majority. <\/p>\n Trump\u2019s triumph has left Democrats adrift, seeking a new message and wondering how they can connect with working Americans again. And the party is facing the reality that a plurality of voters preferred a former president who tried to destroy democracy to stay in power to their candidate. Sufficient voters seemed to decide that they\u2019d prefer a strongman who better voiced their grievances than an alternative who warned that Trump was a threat to democracy. <\/p>\n With their warnings about Trump\u2019s threat to constitutional values, Democrats found themselves in the position of defending a government and an establishment in which many Americans had lost faith, after years of foreign wars and the hollowing out of the blue-collar industrial economy. <\/p>\n This sense of the end of an ancient regime was reflected Saturday when Biden made the latest of his postelection jabs at Trump. He awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom to recipients whom many Democrats see as embodying the democratic order that Trump repudiates. They included former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. Biden also posthumously recognized assassinated former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, whose vaccine-skeptic son split with Democrats and his family and is Trump\u2019s controversial choice to lead the Health and Human Services Department. He also awarded the medal to former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a Republican and the late father of former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, one of Trump\u2019s last and most prominent critics in the GOP. <\/p>\n After the ceremony, Biden implied that despite Trump\u2019s imminent arrival in the White House, the fight to save democracy would go on. \u201cLet\u2019s remember, our sacred effort continues, and to keep going, as my mother would say, we have to keep the faith,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n The party that once prided itself on defending global democracy has, however, long since moved on, profiting from its denial of the events of January 6, 2021, which has helped Republicans vault back to power. <\/p>\n Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, keeping the gavel in a razor-thin victory on Friday, is already laying the groundwork to implement Trump\u2019s ambitious agenda of strict immigration enforcement, tax cuts and slashes to the size of the federal government despite his tiny House majority. <\/p>\n Johnson has also changed his mind on the urgency of upholding the certification of electoral votes. <\/p>\n Four years ago, he was a key player in Trump\u2019s attempts to subvert the result of a democratic election. Even after the bloody riot, the Louisiana Republican voted against the awarding of electoral votes to Biden in Pennsylvania and Arizona based on false claims of election fraud. <\/p>\n This week, however, he said nothing should get in the way of enshrining Trump\u2019s win. <\/p>\n \u201cWe got a big snow storm coming to DC, and we encourage all of our colleagues, do not leave town, stay here, because, as you know, the Electoral Count Act requires this on January 6, at 1 p.m. so whether we\u2019re in a blizzard or not, we are going to making sure this is done,\u201d he told Fox News on Sunday. <\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot delay that certification.\u201d <\/p>\n This story has been updated with Congress\u2019 certification of Trump\u2019s win. <\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Late on a day of chaos and blood on January 6, 2021, it was unimaginable that Donald Trump \u2014 who summoned a mob to Washington and told the crowd to \u201cfight like hell\u201d \u2014 would get anywhere near the presidency again. Yet on Monday, exactly four years after his supporters invaded the US Capitol, beat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/investingsstrategist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} How voters decided on Trump despite the horror of January 6<\/h2>\n
Republicans warn nothing must thwart certification of Trump\u2019s victory<\/h2>\n