A ‘day of love’ with more than 100 casualties

According to Donald Trump, it was a day of love. For those who watched the violent insurrection on January 6, and for the more than 140 law enforcement officers injured that day, it didn’t seem like there was much love on show.

Live video footage showed scores of Trump supporters smashing windows, beating police officers and scrambling over each other as they broke into the Capitol building, in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election. “The most shameful day in American history,” Guardian writer Robert Reich called it.

But the White House is asking people not to believe the evidence of their own eyes, or the accounts of the police – whom Republicans typically venerate. Instead, the Trump administration marked the five-year anniversary of that day by launching a J6 section on its website, which brands the more than 1,500 people convicted in connection with the day as “peaceful patriotic protesters”.

The website claims that Capitol police escalated “tensions” with “peaceful protesters”, and claims that officers were “waving attendees inside the building”. (Police did not invite a violent mob into the Capitol.)

According to the White House’s account, which reads as a cross between state propaganda and Trump supporter fan fiction, it is the Democrats who were responsible for “the real insurrection” of “certifying a fraud-ridden election”. (The election was not stolen from Trump. Joe Biden won the election.)

Other than Trump sycophants, few agreed.

“This distasteful, falsehood-filled page exemplifies the length this White House will go to continue to perpetrate the Big Lie of a stolen election and to deny the violence we all saw with our own eyes,” Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement on Tuesday.

“To go further and claim that democracy itself amounted to an ‘insurrection’ against Trump is an Orwellian gaslighting of the American people who live in a fact-based world and believe that our democracy is sacred.”

It would certainly take an odd understanding of what love means to agree with Trump’s “day of love” verdict.

The insurrection has been linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides and the police shooting of Trump-supporter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a window. More than 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, some seriously, and videos showed police being attacked by flagpoles and other makeshift weapons.

More than 1,500 people were convicted in relation to the insurrection. But Trump pardoned almost all of them after he took office in 2025, including some who had been convicted of other serious offenses before and after the insurrection. According to Citizens for Ethics and Democracy, six of those Trump pardoned have been charged with committing child sexual abuse crimes since January 6, and two have been charged with rape.

As the White House attempted to rewrite history on Tuesday, Democrats did their best to keep the real events of January 6 at the forefront of Americans’ minds. They held an unofficial hearing to examine the effects of the attack, and held a moment of silence to honor the lives lost during the attack.

“Instead of holding those responsible for the attack accountable, Donald Trump and far-right extremists in Congress have repeatedly attempted to rewrite history and whitewash the horrific events of January 6. We will not let that happen,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said.

As for Trump himself? He didn’t post once about January 6 on Truth Social on Tuesday, although he did find time to share a photo of him holding a red hat. In another post, Trump claimed without evidence that the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, had stolen “tens of billions of taxpayer dollars”.

“NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!” Trump added.

Coming after the US attacked Venezuela and dragged its president to New York, potentially in violation of international law, and as the White House said that using the military to seize Greenland is “always an option”, Trump’s statement may not exactly be true.