Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has put the devoted supporters charged with January 6 crimes at the heart of his campaign. He began his first major campaign rally last March firing up the Waco, Texas crowd by playing “Justice for All,” a song he helped produce with the “J6 Prison Choir.” It has since become a staple of his events. On Truth Social last week, Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next President” would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
The story of Trump’s shift — from reluctant denunciations to direct support for those charged in connection with the day’s events — offers a glimpse into the workings of his mind, and of his political operation. The change began gradually, soon after he left office and weathered impeachment proceedings. Two months after he resumed civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, the president described the crowd to two visiting Washington Post reporters as “loving,” and offered a defense of their behavior: Capitol Police had “ushered” them into the building, he said, and were “hugging and kissing” them — a view belied by video footage and widely rejected by the courts. Aides to Trump point to remarks from this period as evidence he always cared about the cause of January 6th defendants.
A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.
That path was smoothed in part by a handful of women — from the high-profile Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to lesser-known figures like Trump campaign staffer Joanna Miller Wischer and Cynthia Hughes, who founded the Patriot Freedom Project. They made the case to him that at least some of his devoted followers charged in the riot were jailed unjustly, and were being treated poorly.
Another crucial factor in Trump’s growing support for the cause may have been his own confrontation with American law enforcement, including over charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which has become a centerpiece of his campaign for president.
“The biggest thing that helped us was him getting arrested, so that the rest of the world can see what is happening to J-6’ers,” Tamara Perryman, whose husband Brian Jackson was charged in connection with the riot, told Semafor during the nightly vigil
