Four years to the day after a mob of Donald Trump supporters violently laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, Congress officially certified the new president’s re-election during a special session.
Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Trump defeated in the 2024 election, presided over the event as required by the US Constitution.
But the shadow of January 6, 2021, lingered over Monday’s proceedings, despite Trump and his allies’ campaign to label the attack a “day of love.”
Heavy security was in place in Washington DC, and current President Joe Biden promised there would be no repeat of the violence four years ago.
Trump celebrated the moment on Truth Social, writing: “Congress today certifies our great election victory – a great moment in history.”
The day was extraordinary in its normalcy, given the chaos of the previous four years. Harris stood before the U.S. House of Representatives with a somber expression as lawmakers read each state’s election results before officially declaring their authenticity.
Although the results declared Trump the winner, Harris received a standing ovation from the Democratic side of the chamber when she read her own electoral tally.
Vice President-elect JD Vance was in attendance. Sitting right next to him was Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the few remaining Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in an impeachment trial following the riot – that vote ultimately failed and Trump was acquitted.
Earlier, House Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to proceed with certification despite bad weather, telling Fox News: “Whether we’re in a snowstorm or not, we’ll be in this chamber to make sure that this is done. “.
Harris, meanwhile, pledged to “fulfill my constitutional duty as vice president to certify the results of the 2024 election.”
“This duty is a sacred obligation – one that I will uphold, guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and an unwavering faith in the American people,” she said in a video statement.
Ordinarily, there would be little reason to comment on such proceedings. The U.S. Constitution requires that the presidential election be certified on January 6 and that the vice president oversee the vote.
But the last time the US Congress met to certify the election of a US president, the vote was delayed for several hours because rioters, driven by the false belief that the 2020 election had been stolen to Trump, smashed windows and pushed their way through lines. police officers, crashed into the chamber of the United States House of Representatives and ransacked the office of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others.
In a speech in Washington DC that day, before violence erupted, Trump told the crowd to “fight like hell” but also asked them to “peacefully” make their voices heard.
Lawmakers, including Republicans, were forced to hide in the basement and Capitol staffers hid wherever they could find shelter. Then-Vice President Mike Pence was forced into hiding when rioters erected a gallows on the Capitol grounds and called for him to be hanged because he refused to inaccurately certify the results in favor of Trump.
AFPAfterward, Capitol Hill guards worked furiously to clean up the broken windows and trashed hallways. Members of Congress spent the next few months coming to terms with the trauma of the attack.
The riot caused nearly $3 million in damage, injured more than 100 police officers and shocked the American political system.
In the aftermath of the attack, which millions of Americans watched unfold on television and social media, there was little debate over who deserved blame.
The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump on charges of inciting the riot, but the U.S. Senate fell short of the two-thirds majority required to convict him. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, explicitly blamed Trump, saying the rioters “did this because they were fed wild lies by the most powerful man on the planet — because ‘He was angry at having lost an election.’
Trump himself faced federal charges over allegations he tried to overturn the 2020 election, to which he has pleaded not guilty. But the Department of Justice (DoJ) was forced to drop the case once he was elected last year, due to protocols that prevented prosecuting a sitting president.
As Trump sought to return to power, he and his allies worked to radically change the narrative around the riot and its causes.
Trump said there was “nothing done wrong” during an October 2024 presidential campaign forum.
He called those convicted by the Justice Department “hostages” and “political prisoners.” And his new vice president, JD Vance, refused to acknowledge during a presidential debate that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Americans now have sharply divided perspectives on that day. A January 2024 Washington Post and University of Maryland poll suggested that a quarter of Americans believed a conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind the attack. While a majority of Americans believe that January 6, 2021, is an attack on democracy, only 18% of Republicans think so, the poll indicates.
ReutersTrump’s second term will begin after his inauguration on January 20. This is a stunning political comeback following his 2020 election defeat and a criminal conviction in 2024 – a first for a current or former US president.
The president-elect has pledged to pardon those convicted of offenses related to the attack. He says many of them are “wrongly imprisoned,” while acknowledging that “a few of them have probably gotten out of control.”
Biden called on Americans to never forget what happened.
“We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it,” Biden wrote in the Washington Post over the weekend.
For Trump’s Republican Party, the new Senate majority leader, John Thune, signaled his desire to move forward, telling CBS News, the BBC’s US partner: “You can’t look in the rearview mirror “.
