By early January 2021, hundreds of recounts had confirmed Joe Biden’s election even as federal and state judges dismissed as “without merit” 60 lawsuits claiming voter fraud. But Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat. On January 6, speaking before more than 50,000 followers on the White House Ellipse, he urged them to march on the United States Capitol to prevent the certification of President-elect Biden’s election. “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” he told them.

Within minutes, thousands of his supporters attacked a small, beleaguered force of police officers with sticks, baseball bats, chemical sprays and other improvised weapons and eventually breaching the Capitol. For three hours, Donald Trump ignored the pleas of his advisers and his family to condemn the attack. Instead he sat in his office and watched the riot on television, approvingly, according to the sworn testimony of several advisers and staff members. Finally, he reluctantly issued a short video asking the rioters to leave the Capitol but praising them and repeated his lies of a stolen election.

In the months that followed, juries—relying heavily on video and photographic evidence—convicted well over a thousand members of the mob of violent assaults on police officers, disrupting an official government proceeding, theft, weapons offenses, and seditious conspiracy.

But on January 20, 2025 just hours after taking office, Donald Trump pardoned the convicted rioters, including many guilty of the most serious crimes. January 6 was a “day of love,” he insisted. Members of the violent mob were “heroes, J6 warriors . . . protesting a rigged election.”

We must not allow Donald Trump to re-write the history of January 6. We have an obligation to remember the men and women who defended our nation’s Capitol. More than 140 suffered injuries; some hospitalized for up to a week. Most of all we have a duty to remember the five who died as a direct consequence of that day. These are the true heroes of January 6, not the men and women pardoned and praised by President Trump.