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January 5th, 2026.
Five years ago, on January 6th, 2021,
more than 2,000 rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol
to try to stop the process of counting the electoral votes
that would make Democrat Joe Biden president of the United States.
They tried to hunt down how Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
a Democrat of California, and chanted their intention to hang Mike Pence,
the vice president.
They fantasized that they were following in the footsteps of the American founders
about to start a new nation.
Newly elected representative Lauren Bobert, a Republican of Colorado,
wrote on January 5th, 2021,
remember these next 48 hours.
These are some of the most important days in American history.
On January 6th, she wrote,
today is 1776.
In fact, it was not 1776, but 1861.
The year insurrectionists who had tried to overthrow the government
in order to establish minority rule tried to break the U.S.
The rioters wanted to take away the right at the center of American democracy,
our right to determine our own destiny.
In order to keep Donald J. Trump in the White House,
making sure the power of elite white men could not be challenged.
It was no accident that the rioters carried a Confederate battle flag.
Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government
that regulates business provides a basic social safety net,
promotes infrastructure and protects civil rights,
crushes the individualism on which America depends.
As cuts to regulation, taxation,
and the nation's social safety net began to hollow out the middle class,
Republicans pushed the idea that the country's problems came from greedy minorities
and women who wanted to work outside the home.
More and more, they insisted that the federal government
was stealing tax dollars and destroying society,
and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.
After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act,
more commonly known as the Motor Voter Law,
enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments.
Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system
by relying on the votes of non-citizens,
although there was never any evidence for this charge.
As wealth continued to move upward,
the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must reclaim America
from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections
became embedded in the Republican Party.
By 2014, Senator Dean Heller, a Republican of Nevada,
called Nevada Rancher Clive and Bundy and his supporters Patriots
when they showed up armed to meet officials
from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy's cattle
because he owed more than a million dollars in grazing fees
for running cattle on public land.
The idea of reclaiming the country for white men
by destroying the federal government grew,
along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating.
In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent
belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country
from the Washington D.C. swamp.
Other Republican leaders who would initially shunned him began to support him
when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters
who could put Republicans into office.
And they continued to support him,
claiming initially that he could be kept in check
by establishment Republicans like his first Chief of Staff,
Ryan Spreebus, who moved from leading the Republican National Committee
to the White House for the first six months of Trump's first term.
In his first months in office, Trump delivered the tax cut
Republican leaders wanted,
as well as the appointment of one out of every four federal judges,
including three Supreme Court Justices
who would protect the Republican Project in the courts.
But the idea that Trump could be kept in check fell apart in September 2019
when it appeared he was trying to rig the 2020 election.
A whistleblower revealed that Trump had called
the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky,
in July 2019 to demand that Zelensky smear former Vice President Joe Biden,
who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season.
Until Zelensky did so, Trump said,
the administration would not release the money Congress had appropriated
to fund Ukraine's fight against Russia,
which had invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The attempt to withhold congressional appropriated funds
in order to tilt an election was a glaring violation of the 1974
Empowerment Control Act,
codifying the executive branch's duty to execute the laws Congress passed.
In the congressional investigation that followed,
witnesses revealed that Trump's cronies were running a secret scheme in Ukraine
to undermine official U.S. policy and benefit Trump's allies.
Republicans in 1974 had turned against President Richard Nixon for far less,
but although Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas,
said not a single Republican Senator believed Trump,
they stood behind him nonetheless.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky,
told his colleagues,
this is not about this President,
it's not about anything he's been accused of doing,
it's about flipping the Senate.
But once acquitted, Trump cut loose from any oversight.
He sought revenge and insisted that when somebody is President of the United States,
the authority is total.
The federal government has absolute power, he said,
and he had the absolute right to use that power if he wanted to.
As early as 2019, Trump had joked about staying in power
regardless of the 2020 election results.
And on October 31st, Trump's allies Steve Bannon told a private audience
that Trump was going to declare that he had won the 2020 election, no matter what.
Trump knew that Democratic mail-in ballots would show up in the vote totals later
than Republican votes cast on Election Day, creating a red mirage
that would be overtaken later by Democratic votes.
Trump's going to take advantage of it, Bannon said,
by calling the election early and saying that the later votes were somehow illegitimate.
That's our strategy. He's going to declare himself a winner, Bannon continued.
Here's the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again.
He's going to say f*** you. How about that?
Because he's done his last election.
Early returns on election night 2020, November 3rd, showed Trump ahead.
But more quickly than anyone expected, Democratic votes turned the key state of Arizona blue.
And the Fox News Channel called the race for Biden.
Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about 230 the next morning and declared he had won.
Although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner.
We won't stand for this, he told supporters assuring them he had won.
We'll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.
But it didn't. And by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close.
Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the electoral college.
Trump insisted a Democrat could not have won honestly.
Over the next few months, his campaign demanded recounts, all of which confirmed that Biden won.
Trump or his surrogates filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits over the 2020 election, most dismissed for lack of evidence.
As legal challenges failed, Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, to win the state of Georgia.
Trump's allies plotted for Trump supporters in seven battleground states to meet secretly and submit false slates of electors for Trump.
Two slates would enable Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count the electors from the now contested states, so that either Trump would be elected outright,
or Pence could say there was no clear winner and send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote.
Since there were more Republican delegations than Democratic ones, Trump would be president.
This is a fight of good versus evil.
Trump's evangelical chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote on November 24, 2020, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginny.
Determined to retain control of the government, certain congressional Republicans went along with the charade that the election had been stolen.
Trump allies in the House began to echo Trump's accusations and to say they would question the counts from certain states.
Such challenges required a paired vote with a senator, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who saw himself as a top 2024 presidential contender, and Ted Cruz of Texas, who didn't want to be undercut, led 11 other senators in a revolt to challenge the ballots.
For weeks, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C. for a stop-the-steel rally arranged for January 6th, the day Congress would count the certified electoral ballots.
Speaking at the ellipse near the White House that morning, Trump and his surrogates told the crowd that they had won the election, and Trump warned, we are going to have to fight much harder.
Trump claimed that Chinese-driven socialists were taking over the country, and told the crowd, we're gathered together in the heart of our nation's capital for one very, very basic and simple reason to save our democracy.
You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing, and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated, and we fight.
We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
And, knowing they were armed, he told them to march to the capital.
As Trump supporters attacked, lawmakers from their hiding spots begged the president to call off his supporters, but he did nothing for more than three hours.
After 540, when the National Guard had been deployed without his orders, thus making it clear the rioters would be overpowered before either taking over the government themselves, or giving him an excuse to declare martial law, Trump issued a video statement.
I know you're hurt, he said. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
But you have to go home now. We love you. You're very special. He tweeted, remember this day forever.
When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for a second time on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection, only 10 Republicans voted in favor, while 197 voted no, four did not vote.
In the Senate trial, seven Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, while 43 continued to back Trump.
In a speech after his vote to acquit, McConnell said, there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day, but said he must answer for his actions in court.
Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, McConnell said.
We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.
In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.
On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump for four felonies associated with his attempt to retain power illegally.
Trump fought back, arguing that he had presidential immunity for his actions. Smith asked the Supreme Court to decide the case immediately, but it waited until the last possible moment.
On July 1, 2024, to decide Donald J. Trump versus United States, finding that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official act at the core of presidential powers.
Trump himself had appointed three of the justices in the majority.
A second grand jury returned a new indictment stripped of the actions now immune, but by then it was too late.
Trump was reelected president, and the Department of Justice has an understanding that it will not indict or prosecute a sitting president.
And so, five years after the events of January 6, 2021, we are learning what it means to have a president who has demonstrated his determination to overthrow our democracy and who does not have to answer to the law.
Although he was elected with less than 50% of the votes cast, Trump claimed an unprecedented and powerful mandate.
As soon as he took office in January 2025, the president and his henchman flouted the 1974 Empowerment Control Act again, seizing Congress's right to control the nation's finances.
Trump used emergency powers to ignore the Constitution and deployed troops in democratic-led cities.
When Congress required the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files, the administration largely ignored the law.
Today, more than two weeks after the deadline, it had released less than 1% of the files.
Ignoring the rights afforded to individuals by the Constitution, Trump is seizing people off the streets and prosecuting his perceived enemies.
Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s.
Today, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN's Jake Tapper,
We live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power, he said.
These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.
That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination.
It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just to select few.
In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican President Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Lincoln asked Americans to take increased devotion to that cause for which they, here, gave the last full measure of devotion and to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish.
Parish from the Earth.
Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.
It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Data Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.
It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Data Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.
