Trump’s promised pardons of Jan. 6 defendants could kick up a political storm

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It is the coming storm.

President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that he’ll pardon many of those imprisoned for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol – perhaps, he has suggested, in “the first nine minutes” after he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20.

That almost surely will trigger an uproar among those who deplore the rampage, an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election that spilled into the halls, offices and legislative chambers of the hallowed building.

At the same time, such a pardon will vindicate Trump supporters who see the insurrection as a legitimate uprising by citizen warriors seeking to right a historic wrong.

The gap between those ardently held but irreconcilable views provides a symbol of the divisions that have left American politics riven between two clashing camps, each with its own perspective of politics and contemporary history. One side prevailed in the election of Joe Biden in 2020, the other with the imminent return to office of Mr. Trump.

That day of upheaval four years ago is the modern American version of the classic dispute that has rippled throughout global history: the debate between identifying rebels as terrorists or as freedom fighters.

To Mr. Trump’s supporters, those who stormed the Capitol while lawmakers were certifying the 2020 election might be considered contemporary equivalents of the fighters for Algerian independence from France between 1954 and 1962 – rebels in the eyes of some, patriots in the view of others.

Over the centuries such distinctions have been applied to Samuel Adams, one of the leaders of the American rebels in the late-18th century now revered as one of the country’s founders; Louis Riel, the prominent figure in the Red River and North-West Resistance in Manitoba in the mid-19th century viewed variously as a traitor to Canada or a hero to Métis people; or Nelson Mandela, a 20th-century terrorist in the view of the apartheid regime of South Africa and, later, president of the country.

Then again, some historians believe there aren’t two sides to an effort to overturn an election in a mature democracy.

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“We’re talking about clear crimes committed against the United States government, actions that didn’t serve the interests of the nation and were malicious in intent and spirit,” said Aram Goudsouzian, a University of Memphis historian. “It’s important to see different peoples’ perspectives in some events in American history, but I struggle to see Jan. 6 in that light. It was a series of lies and rooted in violence.”

The divisions over the Capitol riot are political – and, in the long run, when viewed by scholars decades from now – of historical significance.

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll last year underlines the character of the dispute. It showed that 55 per cent of respondents believed the breaching of the Capitol was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten – a view embraced by 86 per cent of Democrats. At the same time, only 24 per cent of Republicans agreed.

Those differences were telescoped in last month’s Ohio Senate race.

“A Trump pardon would be one more step toward lawlessness on the part of this incoming administration,” Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who was defeated in his 2024 re-election campaign, said in an interview late last week.

Mr. Brown’s successful challenger, Bernie Moreno, asserted in a campaign debate that the people “who broke windows, who damaged personal property” were criminals. But he argued that many of those rounded up after the riot should be considered simply trespassers.

Mr. Trump hasn’t said how he’ll determine which of the nearly 1,000 people who have been charged and convicted for their Capitol activities will be pardoned. His remarks in a Time interview suggested he may distinguish between particularly egregious lawbreakers and others.

“We’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office,” he said. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely.”

John Yoo, a conservative law professor at University of California, Berkeley, speculated that Mr. Trump would pardon those he believes were punished too harshly. “The most plausible case is that won’t include those in tactical military gear who actively tried to hunt down members of Congress,” he said. “It may be people who went in, didn’t fight police, but were punished too much.”

Mr. Trump didn’t say whether he’d pardon himself from charges that he fomented the riot – the view of the House select committee that investigated the attack.

Mr. Biden provided political cover for Mr. Trump when, earlier this month, he issued a “full and unconditional pardon” for his son, Hunter, including his conviction on three federal felony counts for illegally buying a gun.

“Biden inoculated Trump by pardoning Hunter,” said Morris Fiorina, a Stanford University political scientist. “He took away the high ground Trump’s critics might otherwise have.”

The Trump pardons would come a half-century after the most famous pardon in American history, when Gerald Ford in 1974 pardoned former president Richard Nixon, who had resigned a month earlier in disgrace amid the Watergate scandal. The pardon was one of the factors that led to Mr. Ford’s defeat two years later. Eventually, many Americans embraced his argument that the move helped heal an earlier period of great political division.

This situation, however, may be different.

“Ford could defend the pardon as being in the national interest,” said Richard Norton Smith, author of the 2023 book An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. “It’s difficult to put that interpretation now, or in the future, on Trump waving a magic wand and saying that an insurrection either didn’t occur or wasn’t significant enough to warrant punishment.”