What Trump did to police officers

Four years ago, dozens of police officers were attacked just yards from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully carry out the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “guns and things being thrown and pepper spray and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them screaming and moaning and everything else.” One officer later said he was sure he was going to die the moment he stepped into the crowd: “You know, you get pushed, kicked, you know, people throw metal bats at you and all that. I was like, well, this is hell.”

All this happened because Trump, according to special counsel Jack Smiths report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he January 2021 attempted to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to prevent congressional certification of the presidential election and then use rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as evident by their Trump shirts, signs and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officials who were trying to secure the building.”

The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we only know the names of some of the mob’s most famous victims, such as officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were serious. Fanone suffered a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was the attack by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone several surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In his re-election campaign, the man who conjured up this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of those themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump once again won the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP’s vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we see on our streets. We’re tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we just tired of the shit.

Read: Trump’s empty promise of ‘law and order’

The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly did believe is an increase in crime on the streets, but they have spoiled Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of angry rioters against the same police forces that will protect him at today’s inauguration. However, nothing should be allowed to obscure the truth that the Party for Law and Order is now led by not just a convicted felon, but one who silently watched as outnumbered police officers fought for hours to protect the lives of members of the US Congress.

I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes they are all corrupt thugs, would-be murderers no better than the men involved in the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020. My father and brother were both police officers (father in the 1950s and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer and I grew up around the police in my small New England town. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.

Trump has done the same throughout his three presidential campaigns, portraying America as a lawless hell. At least, however, Nixon had the advantage of pointing to the other party and to his political opponents as the source of the danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds that the people who attacked the police on January 6th were his own supportersact according to what they believed were his wishes.

“I’d like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” conservative author George Will said in 2021, “because it was such a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today is likely to thunder on about the return of law and order and vow to make America’s streets safer, but American voters , regardless of their party, should remember what actually happened to dozens of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.

Police officers at the Capitol were attacked with an assortment of weapons — bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet fell off and it felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” Capitol Police Officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun because they stole my baton.”) During all this, Trump tweeted as usual: “I am asking everyone in the US Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the party for law and order – respect the law and our great men and women in blue. Thanks!” Meanwhile the mob pressed on. One officer said rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they punched and tased him while shouting things like “I’ve got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”

Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6 pardon promise

Trump now refers to to many of the rioters who have been convicted and imprisoned as “hostages”. He has promised to pardon some of them when they take office. “Probably I will do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the press last month, adding that “these people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to that. I’ll look. But you know, if someone was radical, crazy.”

The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he praised a choir formed by some of the jailed rebels. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump played it regularly at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said May last year.

Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” was accused of assaulting a law enforcement officer. A troublemaker, Julian Hatehad already pleaded guilty to assaulting several officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throw makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and mind,” he wrote to a colleague in the weeks after the riot, according to to the Ministry of Justice.

Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love”. The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things happen?” Gonell asked last spring.

Surely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women of the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.