Topics: Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, US News
On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, The White House appeared to commemorate the occasion by pretending it hadn’t happened.
In a baffling move that opted to downplay the significance of the event and recalled a very different chain of events leading up to it, White House officials released a new website peddling their alternative view of the facts.
As many of us will no doubt recall, on January 6 2021, a mob of Pro-Trump supporters violently stormed the US Capitol building in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 US election. Five people died in the attack and over 100 police officers were injured, with 1600 Trump supporters arrested for their crimes.
Yet despite the serious nature of the incident, and well-documented historical records of exactly what transpired, Donald Trump claimed the rioters were merely ‘peaceful protestors’ who did nothing wrong. According to the new website, the violence on January 6, 2021, was instigated by law enforcement and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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The rioters were then painted as the ‘victims’ of the atrocity and Trump is seemingly depicted as the forgiving leader who pardoned them all for their apparent ‘patriotism’.
Blame was also levelled at the US Capitol police, who Trump accused of ‘deliberately escalating tensions’ that day among his otherwise ‘peaceful’ supporters that he claimed marched in a rally that was ‘orderly and spirited, with flags, signs, and chants supporting President Trump’.
The White House even chose to downplay the five deaths that occurred a as a direct consequence of the riots while simultaneously claiming that two Trump supporters who died of natural causes that day (of a stroke and heart attack respectively) had been ‘killed’.
The new website marks the first time the White House has publicly given him a platform to share President Trump's oftentimes alternate perspective on certain events.
One of the core themes on the new site is Trump’s long-running — but completely false — claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In fact, it was his continued allegations of mass voter fraud that prompted his MAGA supporters to storm the Capitol in the first place to try and downplay the democratic process that had elected Joe Biden to office.
On a surface level, the new site has raised concern and alarm bells for many Americans, but White House communications director Steven Cheung suggested in an X post that the webpage may not be as it initially appeared, and suggested that it was a ‘trap’ to spark outrage from the media.
If this is the case, it would certainly raise alarm bells among US voters that a global power was using its official online presence to troll the media and peddle false facts in an era of misinformation.
It also calls into question the true motivations behind sharing such a site on the anniversary of such a bleak moment in modern US history.
Yet it wasn’t just the Democrats and liberal media that Trump appeared to be taking aim at in the site, as Republican and former Vice President Mike Pence also didn’t escape unscathed.
In a bizarre dig at his former running mate, Trump claimed that Pence ‘had the opportunity to return disputed electoral slates to state legislatures for review and decertification,’ during the joint session of Congress that day, but chose not to ‘in an act of cowardice and sabotage’.
Pence, for his part, had always stated that refused to certify the election at such a late stage would have been categorically unconstitutional, a belief that was backed up by several senior legal scholars.
Following the release of the website, responses have been varied, with most decrying the false narrative being shared by a political institution.
Nancy Pelosi hit out at the new site in a statement on Tuesday, as she said: “January 6th was not an aberration and it was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of a sustained assault on truth, on the rule of law, and one of the most sacred principles of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.”
She also called January 6 an ‘attempted coup’ incited by Trump to overturn the 2020 election.
