Why Trump’s 2024 presidential vote certification was so different than Jan. 6, 2021 | Opinion
Congress certified Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as the winners of the 2024 presidential election Monday.
It was nothing like the last presidential election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, when officers found themselves protecting the Capitol Building from a mob.
Because Kamala Harris has not spent the past couple of months spreading lies and conspiracy theories about an election she lost.
Because Harris supporters did not scale walls and break windows and injure police and carry weapons to prevent what has long been — and should be — a routine exhibition of democracy.
Because despite all Trump and thousands of his supporters did in the nation’s capital four years ago, Harris oversaw the certification process with neither incident nor significant complaint.
It’s a bittersweet day, one that many Republicans are trying to get you to forget or believe was no big deal. You should not forget. It will forever be a big deal.
A mob of Americans violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They did not like the results of an election. They tried to overthrow a duly elected government. That’s true even though they were foiled. That’s true even though elected officials decided they had to move forward with the certification that day, to prevent the democracy from crumbling as countless people around the world watched in astonishment.
They had to have been astonished that the supposedly most important democracy on the planet seemed anything but, had become what it had long counseled others not to be, not to do.
It was one of the ugliest days in modern American history, one we should not let pass without another reminder of what we nearly lost.
I’ve noted it before. But we can’t be reminded enough, no matter how many times faux patriots demand we close our eyes, wipe our memories and pretend all’s well. Like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.
In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection attempt, Graham was clear. He took to the Senate floor and spoke passionately, recounted the ways in which we almost lost this “great” country before to Americans who wouldn’t accept defeat, even though accepting defeat is a bedrock of a healthy democracy. Without that, there can be no democracy.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said. “I hated it to end this way. God I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today . . . all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
Graham and Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and so many other Republicans who were initially rightly horrified four years ago, changed their minds and again supported the chief insurrectionist, and helped him to get re-elected last year.
There is no bigger dereliction of duty to the country.
I can only imagine what would have happened if a mob of Black and brown Americans attacked the Capitol Building Monday to prevent Trump from becoming president and Vance vice president.
I can only imagine if Harris, the first Black South Asian woman to run for president, had told countless lies, egged on her supporters to “fight like hell” or pressured Democrats in Michigan or North Carolina to “find” her enough votes to give her Electoral College votes she had not earned. How it would have torn apart a country that already seems on the brink of calamity. How it would have transformed Trump and his insurrectionist crowd’s actions into a new trend in American politics, one that would have unmoored this country from its democratic underpinnings.
Instead, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared days ago that there are “no election deniers on our side of the aisle,” to the applause of Democrats who dutifully did Monday what Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection mob didn’t want to happen then.
We must never forget what happened that day, no matter how many times we are told to just move on.
Our democracy is too important to just dutifully go along with that.
This story was originally published January 6, 2025 at 1:39 PM.