A new Donald Trump era: Congress to certify election victory four years after Jan. 6 riot

WASHINGTON – No one expects an angry mob to show up this time.

Four years to the day that supporters of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election, Congress will usher in a new Trump era on Monday when it gathers to count each state’s electoral votes and officially declare him the winner of last year’s presidential contest.

This time, the proceeding is expected to go off smoothly. No rioters storming the Capitol. No one pushing past police barricades and beating officers with makeshift weapons. No lawmakers running through the Capitol’s corridors in fear of their lives. No sitting president pressuring a vice president to thwart the process.

“I think it will almost be a nonevent,” predicted Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

The difference between then and now is Trump.

Four years ago, the Republican refused to acknowledge he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud.

On Jan. 6, 2021, the day Congress was to certify the results of that election, Trump held a rally on the Ellipse with the White House in the background and urged thousands of his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” They did, setting in motion the most violent attack against the seat of government since the War of 1812.

But Trump eagerly embraced the results of last year’s election after he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College over the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. Though Trump had again warned of the possibility of election fraud, he went suddenly silent about those dire predictions after his victory.

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Congressional Democrats are not expected to challenge the election results when they gather to certify them on Monday.

“I think it’s safe to say that even the Democrats heard from the American people that this is what they wanted,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla.

Even so, hanging over the certification process will be unsettling memories of the assault on the Capitol, uncertainty over whether Trump will follow through on his promise to pardon those involved and questions of how the Jan. 6, 2021 attack will be viewed through the broader lens of history.

“For a significant chunk of the population, including me, it will be remembered as a frightening attempt to use force to overrule the results of a presidential election,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard professor who taught a class on the Jan. 6 attacks.

For a different segment of the population, “it may be remembered as a day of courage and heroism,” Keyssar said.

Will Trump issue Jan. 6 pardons?

Either way, Trump, who was impeached twice during his first term, will immediately earn a couple of places in the history books when he begins his second term on Jan. 20. He will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to leave office in defeat and return four years later. He also will become the first president to enter office with a criminal record after his conviction in New York last May on 34 felonies involving hush-money payments to a porn star.

Trump was indicted on federal charges tied to his mishandling of classified documents after he left office and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election leading up to the attack on the Capitol. But three weeks after last year’s election, a judge acting on the request of special counsel Jack Smith dismissed the charges that Trump tried to steal the election in 2020. Smith also effectively ended the classified documents case by dropping his appeal of a separate judge’s dismissal of those charges.

Federal prosecutors did win the conviction of more than 1,000 people who were involved in the Jan. 6 attack. At least 645 were jailed and another 145 were serving home detention as of Dec. 6, according to the Justice Department.

Trump has vowed repeatedly for years to pardon defendants charged in the attack, leading some to ask judges to postpone trials, sentencings or incarceration until after he is inaugurated.

Some defendants have asked permission to attend the inauguration while awaiting trial.

Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who was charged with using a flagpole to intimidate police at the Capitol, asked the court to let him travel to Washington on Jan. 6 to attend a news conference and on Jan. 20 to attend the inauguration.

“The Government is punishing Mr. Tatum by preventing him from attending a press conference as a journalist and from expressing his support for President Trump by attending his inauguration, clearly in violation of Mr. Tatum’s First Amendment rights,” Tatum’s lawyers wrote in their request.

“There is no legitimate government objective to prevent Mr. Tatum from visiting D.C.,” the lawyers argued.

U.S. District Judge John Bates of the District of Columbia denied Tatum’s request, saying his alleged conduct on Jan. 6 was “particularly violent.”

The travel restriction is necessary to ensure community safety, Bates wrote.

Trump hasn’t spelled out what he will do. He voiced sympathy during the campaign for nonviolent offenders and decried long sentences. But he hasn’t detailed how he would weigh pardons for nearly 1,600 people charged and 1,000 people convicted in the riot, which has left his allies and critics waiting to see what he will do on his first day in office.

“The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime, and I will sign their pardons on Day One,” he told a Wisconsin rally in September.

For Trump, pardoning the defendants would amount to the concluding chapter of the Jan. 6 saga, said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of a book on Trump’s first term as president.

“He survived all the prosecutions, and he survived the electoral threat that that posed to his future and to the MAGA future,” Zelizer said. “Then he won reelection, and he won it with the popular vote and with all the swing states. A pardon is the final step, saying, ‘You’re free.’”

Congressional Democrats warn pardoning those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection would send the wrong message.

“The pardon power should be used to correct procedural or substantive injustices,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and a former professor of constitutional law.

“No one has identified any injustice in the prosecution of people who violently assaulted police officers, who were engaged in seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States,” Raskin said. “I would view the promise of pardoning hundreds of convicted insurrectionists as a continuation of the assault on American constitutional democracy.”

Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., said granting a pardon to the Jan. 6 defendants, particularly those who committed acts of violence, would send a signal that “violent law-breaking will be allowed as long as it is done under a MAGA banner.”

“That would open the floodgates to chaos all across the country because there will be a whole lot of people out there, including deranged and violent individuals, who think that Donald Trump will give them a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” Magaziner said.

Magaziner said he recognizes the vast majority of Trump supporters are peaceful, patriotic Americans, “but we're not talking about peaceful patriotic Americans when we talk about the Jan. 6 rioters. We’re talking about criminals and many of whom committed acts of violence.”

History's view of Jan. 6

For some lawmakers, Trump’s threats to investigate, prosecute and imprison his perceived enemies are another cause for alarm. During a December interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said members of a congressional committee that spent 18 months investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection should go to jail.

That’s not how government works, Raskin said.

“The whole point of the American Constitution is we have no kings here,” Raskin said. “We have no monarchs. We have no queens, no emperors. We don't put people in jail because the president doesn't like them.”

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Trump’s return to power will likely result in a revisionist history in terms of how Jan. 6 is remembered among a segment of the American electorate, Keyssar said. In Trump’s view and that of many of his supporters, he said, Trump's victory in November validated many of his grievances about the 2020 election.

“There's a large segment of the American population which equates democracy as the protection of the rights and powers for some people but not others – and, thus, it was legitimate to have this attack on the (election) procedures because the procedures were leading to the wrong outcome,” Keyssar said.

In many ways, Keyssar said, it’s reminiscent of how regional differences shaped Americans’ understanding of the Civil War for more than a century and, in some cases, even today.

“In the South,” he said, “they continue to call it the war of northern aggression.”