Washington.- In the first presidential debate, Republican Donald Trump glossed over the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, shifted blame for the violent mob siege and repeatedly refused to state unequivocally that he would accept the results of this year’s White House election.
And President Joe Biden, who has said the job of his presidency is to restore the soul of the nation, blundered and dithered, failing to forcefully confront, contradict and hold Trump, the impeached former president, accountable for the attack on the election — and on democracy.
It’s an extraordinary moment — or lack thereof — that’s alarming for democracy advocates, as the sweeping effort to overturn the 2020 election and subsequent insurrection that defined Trump’s presidency fades into obscurity during the opening debate of the general election campaign.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who chaired the House committee’s Jan. 6 investigation in the last Congress, said it was a deeply unfortunate development.
“We could have a January 6 2.0,” Thompson said Friday outside the Capitol.
The outcome underscores the dilemma facing Americans this fall as the revolt over the 2020 election remains central to the 2024 campaign but also overshadowed by it, despite the four-count federal indictment of Trump for working to overturn the results four years ago in the run-up to the violent siege and despite the convictions of more than 1,000 people in the attack on the Capitol.
It comes as the Supreme Court weighs cases related to January 6, including a Friday decision making it easier for some rioters to challenge their charges and convictions, and another expected Monday on whether Trump can claim immunity in the federal election case. .
In short, what seemed politically untenable when a defeated Trump left Washington dejected on Biden’s inauguration day on January 20, 2021, is now within reach as the president who tried to overturn an election is the presumptive Republican nominee on the cusp of returning to the Oval Office.
“We’re four months away from the first presidential election since the violent attack on our Capitol. … And the man responsible for that — Donald Trump — is currently the front-runner,” said Ian Bassin, executive director of the advocacy group Protect Democracy, which works to counter authoritarianism.
“You would think that that alone would be disqualifying, or at the very least it would be the central focus of the election,” he said.
However, according to Bassin, the issue was “relegated to an afterthought” in the debate, “and the current president is struggling to make the case for why this issue should have existential importance.”
The forum itself is not necessarily to blame. Moderators pressed the candidates, asking Trump not once but several times if he would commit to not holding another January 6th and to accepting the election results this time.
Trump insisted he had “virtually nothing to do” with the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and sought to shift blame to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, repeating his false claims about the delay in sending in the National Guard.
Biden, whose disappointing debate performance, with short answers and lagging thoughts, has plunged the Democratic Party into confusion, struggled to give a coherent response, despite having delivered high-level speeches about January 6, including in the first anniversary.
“Look, he encouraged those people to go up to the Capitol,” Biden said on the debate stage.
Thompson, whose committee produced a sprawling, 1,000-page report on its investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and the storming of the Capitol, said Biden missed a “golden opportunity” to set the record straight as millions watched the debate.
The response belonged to the people who actually lived on January 6, the lawmakers who fled to safety as the mob of Trump supporters approached. The rioters, many wielding flagpoles and wearing tactical gear, engaged in brutal and bloody hand-to-hand combat, fighting US Capitol Police to gain access to the building.
“January 6 was a dark day,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on social media.
“Trump-inspired insurrectionists sought to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power,” he said. Schumer decried Friday’s “shameful” decision by the Supreme Court that, he said, “will embolden anti-democratic radicals and make it more difficult for our judicial system to try insurrectionists.”
Pelosi said Trump presented “another pack of lies” during the debate. “How dare he place the blame for January 6 on anyone other than himself, the inciter of an insurrection?”
On Friday, the Supreme Court limited a federal obstruction law that has been used to impeach Trump, along with hundreds of other Capitol riot defendants. While the ruling is certain to prompt reconsideration of some cases against the rioters, it is unclear how it will affect Trump’s impeachment, which includes other charges.
Trump, speaking at a rally Friday in Chesapeake, Virginia, said a “great thing” just happened in response to the obstruction decision, to roars of “USA!” chants from the crowd.
“They should be released immediately – immediately,” Trump said of the defendants he called “the J6 hostages.”
A more assertive Biden, at his own rally in the swing state of North Carolina, said that “the choice in this election is simple. Donald Trump will destroy our democracy. I will defend it.”
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