Four years after Jan. 6, pardons for rioters would be an insult — and threat — to Jews
If pardoned Jan. 6 rioters return to promoting antisemitism, that’s on Trump
Demonstrators erect a wooden cross outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. Photo by Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman January 6, 2025
Harry Dunn, a former Capitol police officer, said President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to pardon Jan. 6 rioters is a “slap in the face” to the officers that rioters attacked and assaulted that day.
You know who else blanket pardons would slap in the face? Jews.
On the fourth anniversary of the 2021 attack, let’s remember, accurately, the nature of the mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol. Trump and the MAGA faithful have been trying to recast that mini-civil war as a “day of love.” By blurring the memory of that awful day, Trump can make his promised pardons for the rioters seem like an act of mercy — when, in fact, they would set the stage for more violence and more hate.
Two words should leap to mind each time Trump repeats his “day of love” gaslighting: “Camp Auschwitz.”
The man who stormed the Capitol wearing a T-shirt that read “Camp Auschwitz” was sentenced to 75 days in prison back in 2022. Police found even more Nazi paraphernalia during a raid on his home.
But it wasn’t just him. Many of the Jan. 6 rioters espoused white supremacist and antisemitic beliefs, with some even carrying hate symbols, like Confederate flags, into their pathetic but deadly crusade. It was, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, “an inflection point for extremism in America.”
Jan. 6, the ADL wrote in a report after the attack, was “a symbol of our national failure to prevent the terrifying rise of extremism and an ominous oracle of the ways in which extremism would mutate.”
Part of that mutation is the very Jan. 6 revisionism that Trump made part of his reelection campaign. The not-so-subtle message is that the chaos and violence we saw with our own eyes was not so bad.
Don’t for a second believe it. Jan. 6 was, as others have pointed out, America’s very own Beer Hall Putsch, Adolph Hitler’s attempted 1923 coup d’etat. Instead of spelling the end of the nascent Nazi movement, the coup galvanized the party and centered Hitler as its leader. What should have been the end of the movement became its start. Sound familiar?
“The Nazis mythologized the putsch and instituted a cult of martyrdom around their fallen comrades,” writes Richard J. Evans in Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.
Holocaust and Nazi Germany comparisons often come across as hysterical. But this is a case where history really does rhyme. Just as Hitler reframed the putsch as an example of “a fanatically extreme nationalism of the highest ethics and morality,” Trump and the right-wing media have been trying to recast Jan. 6 as patriotic, and the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters as unjust.
No. Simply, no. The rioters represented a dangerous and extremist fringe, who, once enabled by mass pardons, will all but surely continue to spread hate.
Consider Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who was convicted of disorderly conduct for storming the Capitol, and jailed. Cusanelli once wrote that, “Hitler should have finished the job.” In 2020, he reportedly posted a video complaining of a “Hasidic Jewish invasion” of New Jersey and comparing Orthodox Jews to a “plague of locusts.” Since his release in December, 2023, he has given at least two speeches in support of the Jan. 6 rioters at Trump’s own Bedford Country Club in New Jersey.
At least 1,572 defendants have been charged in the Jan. 6 attack, and more than 1,251 have been convicted or pleaded guilty. At least 645 of those defendants have been sentenced to jail or prison for terms ranging from a few days to 22 years.
Beyond individuals, many of the groups behind the riot have a track record of promoting antisemitic and white supremacist ideologies and conspiracies. The Three Percenters, QAnon, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have all pushed Holocaust denialism and Jewish financial conspiracies.
When a court convicted members of the Proud Boys for their part in the riot, the ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted that, “these convictions are an important step towards protecting our institutions from extremism.”
One former Oath Keepers member, Jason Van Tatenhove, told me that the group regularly traffics in Holocaust denialism and the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that Jews and so-called “elites” are trying to increase immigration to replace white Christian Americans with minorities.
These people are in prison, or have been convicted, not for what they believe but for what they did. Releasing them and pardoning the crimes of those who have served their sentences sends exactly the wrong message. Instead of protecting our institutions from extremism, a pardon would make our institutions more vulnerable to it; it would suggest that violent actions rooted in hate are, in some way, noble.
Trump has been creatively unclear about which of the rioters he will pardon, claiming at some times that he won’t include those who committed violence and, at other times, insinuating a blanket pardon.
But even the Trump-supporting editorial page of The Wall Street Journal has come out against such a move.
“Pardoning such crimes would contradict Mr. Trump’s support for law and order,” the Journal wrote, “and it would send an awful message about his view of the acceptability of political violence done on his behalf.”
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