The Terrorist In Chief

January 6th Was A Terrorist Attack. Trump was its Bin Laden.

Five years ago today, on January 6, 2021, the United States watched a mob storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power. They attacked the sacred seat of the Republic on orders of man who lost an election, but maintained control of his Forever Cult.

Call it whatever euphemism helps you sleep: a “riot,” a “protest that got out of hand,” a “tour group with bad vibes.” But in plain English, it was a terrorist attack. It was political violence aimed at overturning a constitutional process through fear, force, and intimidation. It degraded the values, history, and sacrifices that made this country what it was for 250 years. It was an assault designed to make Congress, Trump’s own Vice President, and anyone else standing between Donald Trump and power, choose between duty and survival

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Terrorism isn’t a mystical category that requires a foreign accent or a secret lair in Pakistan. Terrorism is violence deployed for political ends. That day, the end was simple: break the counting of electoral votes, break the system, break the law, and keep Trump in office.

And if you want the cleanest, least-deniable definition of what that mob was trying to do, you don’t have to take it from a Democrat, a liberal, or some “woke” historian. Mitch McConnell said it out loud: “What we saw here on January 6th was an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another.”

That’s the ballgame. That’s the crime. That’s the sin.

Osama bin Laden didn’t personally steer a Boeing into an American target on 9/11/2001. He lit the fuse, fed the grievance, built the myth, and pointed his followers at the target. The same is true here.

Donald Trump didn’t have to break a window to be the architect of the attack. He didn’t have to violently assault a cop to be the man responsible for the blood on the marble. The point of a demagogue is that other people do the dirty work while he plays the innocent, the wounded, the persecuted martyr.

And even Mitch McConnell, that cold-blooded Senate operator who chose power over America admitted the obvious after the impeachment trial: “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

So let’s say it plainly: Trump was the instigator. Trump was the recruiter. Trump was the commander. He was the guy on the Oval, telling his followers that the nation had been stolen from them, that they were patriots, and that “fighting” was the only remaining option.

The pardons didn’t “heal” anything. They rewarded the violence.

Now, five years later, we’re living with the next act in the same ugly play: the mass pardons of the January 6 offenders: roughly 1,500 Trumphadis swept up in a blanket clemency.

Let’s be crystal clear about what a pardon does in this context. It wasn’t “mercy.” It isn’t “reconciliation.” It’s not “turning the page.”

It is state-sponsored validation of political violence.

It is the President of the United States using the constitutional power of clemency to tell every would-be future mob: If you attack the right people for the right political reasons, we’ve got your back.

And if you want to understand why so many of the officers who defended the Capitol have been rightly seething ever since, it’s because they know exactly what this means: their injuries, their trauma, and their service were just turned into a prop in Trump’s revenge theater. The assault on them is being downplayed, laundered, and rewarded, a punchline on Fox.

This is how democracies rot. Not all at once. Not with a dramatic military coup and a brass band. They rot when power tells violence, “Good job. Try again.”

The GOP’s cowardice in the wake of 1/6 is a historical stain that will never wash out.

The Republican Party didn’t just fail on January 6. The Republican Party has failed every day since, by refusing to treat that attack as what it was: an attempt to overthrow a lawful election.

They could have drawn a bright moral line: no excuses, no minimization, no rehabilitation, no lies. They could have isolated the extremists. They could have made it politically fatal to flirt with insurrection. They could have rejected Trump.

Instead, they did what they always do: they looked at the monster they helped create, then asked themselves whether it polled well in the suburbs, whether the base was still with the Donald.

And no one embodies that cowardice more perfectly than Mitch McConnell.

McConnell gave speeches about responsibility and then sandbagged behind process of impeachment. He denounced Trump’s behavior and then structured his own actions so that Trump would survive politically. He called January 6 an attack on the peaceful transfer of power and then acted as if that transfer of power was just another item on the Senate calendar. When it mattered most, when consequences could have been real, he took the advice of his staff and strategists and stuck with Trump.

McConnell is not at the pinnacle of men to blame for the sick radiation of the aftermath. For that, we have to look at the single greatest failure of the Biden Administration: Merrick Garland.

Merrick Garland will go down as the man who looked at this terrorist attack and the entire coup conspiracy of which it was only the most visible part, and whiffed. HE looked at an honest-to-God attack on American constitutional order and decided to fight it like he was litigating a zoning dispute in Bethesda.

He treated the architects of January 6 like they were too delicate to touch, too complicated to name, too politically “sensitive” to charge, while the clock ran out. He thought the world would reward him for being an institutionalist.

Yes, thousands of slack-jawed MAGA foot soldiers got swept up, processed, and sentenced, but the headquarters of the operation, the funders, the planners, the pressure-campaign lawyers, the inside men, the political arsonists in suits, the Bannons and Stones and Joneses laughed it off for months and years while DOJ deliberated itself into paralysis.

Garland didn’t just fail to prosecute quickly; he broadcast to every future strongman and every future mob that if you aim high enough, if you wrap your coup in flags and “legal theories” and cable-news noise, you can stall the American state until it forgets how to swing.

And what do we have now? A nation clinging to the rule of law by its bloody fingernails.

When you refuse to impose consequences on the man who incited an attack on the Capitol, you don’t end the story. You postpone the sequel. When you treat democratic arson as a “both sides” controversy, you invite the arsonist back into the house with a fresh can of gasoline. When you have Democrats smugly intoning on cable shows that “Of course, Trump can’t run again, and he’d never try to seize power and stay in the White House” it should make your brain explode.

The damage to the peaceful transition of power was the point. The lawlessness and violence were the point. And it worked.

Every American civics class teaches the same sacred principle: we don’t settle elections with fists. We settle them with ballots. And when the votes are counted, the loser leaves.

The peaceful transfer of power is not a minor tradition. It is the core mechanism that prevents political competition from turning into blood feuds. It’s what separates democracies from strongman states. It’s what keeps political defeat from becoming existential terror.

January 6 was designed to shatter that principle.

And the pardons are designed to finish the job by rewriting the lesson. The new lesson is this: the transition of power is only “peaceful” if the losing side accepts losing. If they don’t, violence becomes “understandable,” criminals become “hostages,” and the law becomes a partisan toy.

That is a fatal bargain. Because once you normalize this, you don’t just pardon the past…you authorize it for the future.

Remember what you saw.

Here’s the thing about January 6: you can’t gaslight a country that watched it happen. You can’t erase the footage. You can’t unbreak the windows. You can’t un-scream the chants, un-crush the bodies in the tunnel, un-hear the panic in the voices of people trapped inside the Capitol while a mob hunted for lawmakers like prey.

You can try to bury it in propaganda. You can try to disinfect it with language. You can try to drown it in pardons and process arguments and “moving on.”

But it was a terrorist attack, and it was an attack on the idea that America is governed by law, not by rage.

Donald Trump was its Bin Laden.

And if we can’t say that out loud on the fifth anniversary, if we can’t name the crime, name the architect, and name the cowardice that made it possible then we’re not commemorating January 6.

We’re rehearsing for another.