Aaron Thacker is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s served as military police, been posted at a detention facility, and witnessed more of the decades-spanning global War on Terror — both at home and abroad — than most Americans can imagine. Thacker says there are only two dates that filled him with a uniquely heightened sense of fear and horror for his country as he watched them unfold in real time: 9/11 and Jan. 6, 2021.
“I was at Fort Bliss, Texas, on September 11, 2001, and I had just finished a physical fitness test. I was very low-ranking, it was very early in my career. I jumped in the car, and I had the radio on. You know how these NPR reporters have this way of talking very calmly? In a ‘maybe we’ll go have tea after this’ sort of way, with this soothing cadence? That’s how it sounded when they were talking about aircraft hanging out of the side of this building, and it wasn’t computing right in my brain. I got back to my house and turned on the TV and saw the second aircraft hit. When that happened, it was the same feeling of ‘what the fuck is going on right now?’ that I had when I was watching Jan. 6 unfold.”
“There was an emotional link between how I felt in those two separate moments,” Thacker tells Rolling Stone. “My entire career was defined by Sept. 11 and I don’t think anything has hit that way for me, besides Jan. 6.”
Four short years ago to the day, Thacker was sitting in his Virginia apartment in the Crystal City neighborhood just across the water from the nation’s capital. At the time, he was a senior official in the communications department of the National Guard. It was still the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in a ruptured, devastated country, and he was one of so many Americans working remotely. At his home-office desk, he had two screens set up for his computer, and then another monitor for his TV. He says he had CNN on in the background. “I was watching the rally, doing my job, and keeping an eye on things,” he says.
But after President Donald Trump and other speakers’ calls to election-stealing action, and after it became clear on live television that the rally had turned into a march that had segued into a swell of violence at the Capitol building, Thacker recalls his “snap instinct” as a soldier was to grab his gun.
“I got this sense of hyper-vigilance,” he recounts. “There was a moment when I made sure to know where my personal weapon was at. … It was more of a response out of fear than out of rationale. It’s not like I was going to use it and I left it behind when I had to leave my apartment. But I didn’t want it boxed up or locked up somewhere, is what I was thinking at that moment. … It was just my instinct to respond that way.”
Thacker doesn’t recall exactly how long he held the firearm in his hand as he watched the Capitol insurrection mount, but for most of the rest of the day, his loaded handgun sat there on his desk next to his computer. The following morning, he reported to the D.C. Armory across the river to laboriously set up the comms side of the Guard’s mission for what would become the most heavily militarized presidential inauguration in modern American history.
To this day, former and now future President Trump likes to say Jan. 6 was a “day of love,” and that the convicted rioters, whom he sicced on Congress to halt Biden’s legitimate assumption of the presidency, should be pardoned, if not lionized. Thacker — who is now a senior aide to Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes — didn’t sleep much the night before he deployed to D.C. on Jan. 7. He knew what kind of day Jan. 6 actually was. “In war, you expect bad things to happen,” he says. “But even [those things, in my personal experience] didn’t compare to how I felt about what happened on Jan. 6 … [because] it was not supposed to happen. Americans are not supposed to do that to each other.”
The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a blatantly authoritarian operation by an electorally defeated president to cling to power and shred the nation’s democratic order.
By late January 2021, Trump finally relinquished the office as a wildly unpopular president during a still-raging global pandemic, leaving behind an immeasurably broken country and a historic mess for his Democratic successor to drown in. At the time, there was no shortage of members of the Republican Party elite rushing to denounce the delusional, soon-to-be former president, with senior veterans of his administration unafraid to unload on him — on the record — with lines like: “Yesterday was the worst day for the Republican Party since Lincoln’s assassination.”
The attack on the Capitol that Trump instigated led to bloodshed, Americans dying, a second presidential impeachment, a high-profile congressional inquiry, lawsuits, criminal investigations, and the first federal criminal charges of a president in the nation’s history were soon triggered.
Then, despite everything, Trump got away with it.
It didn’t take long for the Republicans who helped him skirt accountability to fall in line. Prominent GOP lawmakers and other conservative leaders to came crawling back to their boss just weeks after the attack. A plurality of the American electorate did the same just under four years later.
In two weeks following this year’s anniversary of the deadly Capitol assault that he instigated, Trump is set to be sworn back into the presidency. He will return to power in an inauguration ceremony held at that very same Capitol a MAGA mob stained with literal blood. And he’s going to reenter to the White House after years of campaigning on a platform of punishing those who attempted to hold him accountable for that abomination, and pardoning pro-Trump rioters who bought his lies and conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The Republican Party, conservative movementarians, and Trump’s unusually venal allies in right-wing media have spent years injecting propaganda into the American bloodstream, insisting that one, little riot where a few people passed away was no big deal and only the perennially out-of-touch still care about it. Instead of backing away from the abyss of Trump’s brazenly anti-democratic vision of elections, influential conservative figures across the country and throughout the party’s top ranks have spent virtually all of his brief post-presidency cementing his heads-I-win-tails-you-lose electoral philosophy into Republican dogma and practice.
At least in terms of the simple binary of Trump standing trial on those criminal charges versus the president-elect evading that inconvenience by winning the 2024 election, the relentless propaganda, obviously, worked like a charm for him, for Mitch McConnell, and for the rest of them.
It’s one of the reasons why there has been a top-to-bottom failure to hold Trump accountable for that afternoon of mayhem, election-subverting violence, and fatalities. A bipartisan congressional select committee was formed to investigate the attack, and produced damning revelations of Trump’s actions and a series of shocking public testimonies. “What I saw was just a war scene,” Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards testified in June 2022. “There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood.”
The committee ultimately found that Trump “lit that fire” and referred him for criminal charges. Criminal investigations into Trump and his election-denying cohorts were also launched, including by Special Counsel Jack Smith for the Biden-era Justice Department, resulting in the now-president-elect’s indictment on felony charges.
But when Trump won in November, all of that came tumbling down.
That delayed federal trial isn’t happening. Trump was reelected on a vow to do away with Smith and his criminal cases, and following the 2024 election, the Biden DOJ and Smith preemptively did Trump’s work for him and shuttered the cases. Last month, the president-elect told NBC News that members of the Jan. 6 House committee should be jailed “for what they did.” And over the past two years, close Trump allies have been crafting plans for how to potentially retaliate against, or investigate, Smith and his staff. Now they have the chance and the power of the federal government to do it.
In the wake of Trump’s 2024 victory and these cascading defeats for a shred of accountability, it may feel all too easy for the media, for Democratic politicians, for voters, for everyone, to conclude that going on and on about Jan. 6 “didn’t work” — and that maybe, just maybe, normal people don’t think it was that historically awful and therefore we all just need to move on.
There are some, however, who do not get the luxury of hurling Trump’s blood-smeared coup attempt down the nation’s collective memory hole.
The victims are too many to count, and some of them — including law enforcement personnel who fought the mob at the Capitol that day — have publicly, graphically detailed why this moment in modern American history wasn’t just, oh, one of those things.
“The idea that we are on the cusp of normalizing political violence in this country is false. We have already normalized it,” retired D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, who was brutally attacked by Trumpist rioters on Jan. 6, told Rolling Stone about a month before Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris. “It’s been normalized because elected leaders, government officials, and people in positions of authority in this country feel it’s okay to settle a policy disagreement by using violence and the threat of violence and inspiring their supporters to use violence. So, here we are.”
Fanone noted that he received threats in the aftermath of his congressional testimony, most of them over the internet and the phone. The threats took a turn down the stretch of the 2024 election, he says. “There has been a huge uptick in face-to-face encounters where people have harassed me in public, threatened me, threatened members of my family, spit in my face — so much so that it’s become almost daily interactions.”
The retired officer further described a moment in the waning months of 2024 when “somebody who I see [at the gym] frequently…[told me that] when Donald Trump becomes president again, he looks forward to seeing me tried by military tribunal and hung in public.”
Fanone is far from the only current or former law enforcement member who is disgusted with the normalization of what happened at the Capitol four years ago, and the lack of accountability for those who have played a role in normalizing it. Daniel Hodges, a D.C. police officer who was attacked by rioters at the Capitol, will return to the site on Monday as Trump’s win is certified. “It will be my honor to make it as uncomfortable as possible for the GOP members who try to whitewash that day and lie about what happened and pretend we didn’t save them,” he told CBS News.
There are also the countless men and women like Thacker, servicemembers on the periphery of the attack itself who have dedicated their lives to defending the United States and the democratic order that Trump tried to tear down.
Rolling Stone asked Thacker to reflect on how he feels now that the man responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol assault is returning to the Oval Office. Thacker repeatedly references his “soldier mentality” and his strict belief in respecting the office of the presidency, no matter which party occupies it. “He’s just one man. There are a whole bunch of people who decided to follow him,” he says.
“There’s that old saying about: ‘Fuck around and find out.’ Well, we’re done fucking around so we’re about to find out,” Thacker adds. “What you need to do is be vigilant. Be prepared. And I guess I’m going to be way more vigilant these next four years than I have been in a while. … As much as I want to support him, because he’s the president, I don’t know if I can trust him to do the right thing. Why didn’t he do the right thing that day [on Jan. 6]? That’s one thing that makes me nervous about all this.”
As he reflects on all of this, there is something else that Thacker says he will never be able to forget.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2021, he was back in uniform and driving towards the D.C. Armory where he was deployed. It had been a long night and he needed caffeine first. After pulling into a Dunkin’ Donuts near the Eastern Market Metro station, he noticed how eerily desolate the neighborhood was — because of the pandemic, because of the violence at the nearby Capitol. Inside, he spotted just two people: the man working the counter, and someone else off to the side of Thacker’s peripheral vision. When the second man walked closer, Thacker immediately realized that the stranger was a uniformed Capitol Police officer.
“The look on his face,” Thacker recalls. “There were so many emotions in just one look. I saw fear, exhaustion, sadness — and I saw relief. … It was this moment that has stuck with me ever since that day.”
He says the officer walked up to him, shook his hand, and simply said: “Hey, I’m so, so glad you’re here.”
Thacker told the officer he hoped he was all right. The officer didn’t really have much to say after that, but as days went on, other officers who were present on Jan. 6 began filling in the gaps to Thacker. “I met people who told me about their firsthand experiences with the mob: the bear spray, the gouging, the knives — all the things that make up what I guess a ‘tourist day’ at the Capitol means to these people.”
On this anniversary of Trump’s so-called “day of love,” Congress is scheduled to certify his Electoral College win in the same building that was stormed by the violent pro-Trump mob just four years ago to the day.
During this transition period, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have repeatedly committed to the peaceful transfer of power — a modern process that until the end of Trump’s first administration was taken for granted. This is no longer the case.
In so many ways: Trump won.
And he got away with it.
This post was originally published on here
