Donald Trump has spent recent months focusing on Jan. 6 rioters to an unsettling degree, offering them praise, support, and vows of future pardons. An Associated Press report in March, for example, noted that the former president has positioned “the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.” This coincided with a comparable Semafor report on the degree to which the Republican has put Jan. 6 rioters “at the heart of his campaign.”
As regular readers know, we’ve reached the point in the cycle in which the presumptive GOP nominee refers to Jan. 6 rioters as “hostages” in practically every public appearance, as he focuses on his bond with suspected and convicted insurrectionists.
But in an unexpected development, it appears the incumbent president’s political operation appears increasingly eager to focus on Jan. 6, too.
Last week, for example, President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign released a new ad, narrated by actor Robert De Niro, reminding viewers of Trump’s role in, among other things, instigating the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol. This week, CNN reported that Team Biden has also enlisted three police officers from Jan. 6 to hit the campaign trail in battleground states.
Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, Officer Harry Dunn and Officer Danny Hodges plan to tell voters across key swing states that former President Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy and to their fundamental rights as Americans. Dunn and Gonell sustained injuries during the attack on the Capitol and have since retired from the Capitol Police. Hodges continues to serve with DC’s Metropolitan Police Department.
“We were the victims, we lived through it,” Dunn told CNN. “If I can tell that story a million times, I will. If I can do that, I’ll just be doing my part to save democracy.”
According to CNN’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Gonell, Dunn, and Hodges will “travel to Nevada and Arizona this week and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire in the weeks to follow.”
Trump has a difficult relationship with law enforcement, which makes seeing Jan. 6 officers hit the campaign trail in support of Biden’s re-election campaign all the more notable.
But I’m also reminded of a report from Columbia Journalism Review, which recently spoke to Celinda Lake, one of the leading pollsters who worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and who was stunned during a focus group session with swing voters.
According to the report, Lake had asked how the voters felt about Trump’s indictment related to Jan. 6.
“They go, ‘What court case around Jan. 6?’” the pollster recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’”
The more the public is reminded of Jan. 6, and Trump’s responsibility for the violence, the greater the electoral risks for the presumptive Republican nominee. Indeed, a new dynamic is taking shape: Trump is aligning himself with rioters, while Biden aligns himself with police officers who defended the Capitol.
