Two days before former US president Donald Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail on his fourth indictment, he held an event at his golf club in New Jersey for another group of people facing criminal charges: rioters accused of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Standing next to a portrait of himself portrayed as James Bond, Trump told the defendants and their families that they had suffered greatly, but that all of that would change if he won another term.

“People who have been treated unfairly are going to be treated extremely, extremely fairly,” he said to a round of applause at the event in August in Bedminster, New Jersey. “What you’ve suffered is just ridiculous … but it’s going to be OK.”

That private event was emblematic of how Trump has embraced dozens of January 6 defendants and their relatives and highlights how he has sought to undermine law enforcement when it suits him, while he also puts forth a law-and-order campaign.

Recently, however, his celebrations of the Capitol riot and those who took part in it have become more public as he has promoted a revisionist history of the attack and placed it at the heart of his 2024 presidential campaign.

Despite the nearly 1000 guilty pleas and convictions that have been secured in criminal cases stemming from January 6, Trump has repeatedly described the rioters who broke into the Capitol as “hostages” and has started to open his campaign events with a recording of riot defendants singing the national anthem from their jail cells.

By doing all of this, Trump has risked radicalising his most die-hard supporters even further, encouraging them to repeat events like those that unfolded on January 6.

“It normalizes violence as a legitimate solution to political grievances,” said Robert Pape, a scholar at the University of Chicago who has studied American political violence in the wake of the Capitol attack. “And so it makes it more likely that politically angry people will resort to it.”

Trump makes Capitol attack an election issue

Most politicians would likely have avoided focusing on an episode that shocked the nation as January 6 did, and that polling consistently has shown alienates swing voters. But Trump has paid increasingly more attention to January 6 in his general election campaign.

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Trump’s attention to January 6 has provided President Joe Biden with a political opportunity. Biden recently invited two Capitol Police officers who were attacked by the mob to speak at one of his own campaign events. As part of his message of seeking to protect democracy, he has repeatedly described the assault on the Capitol as one of the country’s darkest days.

“Trump said that there was ‘a lot of love’ on January the 6th,” Biden said in a January speech at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence.”

Still, Trump has a long history of creating alternate versions of reality when it works to his advantage. And as he has struggled to expand his voting coalition over three campaigns, he seems to have recognised that issues surrounding January 6 motivate his base. The subject has helped him strengthen the bond he shares with his supporters by painting them as he likes to paint himself – as victims of a federal law enforcement system run amok.

Trump changed mind on Capitol riot

Trump hasn’t always embraced January 6 – at least not openly.

Prodded by his advisers, he publicly disavowed the attack within days of the Capitol being stormed, even though behind closed doors he strongly resisted saying the election was over, according to the House select committee that investigated the attack.

Soon, however, Trump began to echo the growing attempts to revise the history of the Capitol attack. In doing so, he often followed the lead of far-right politicians, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who were in turn following the lead of a small but vocal group of right-wing journalists and activists.

Trump’s embrace of January 6 not only has meant describing the attack in which more than 100 police officers were injured as a “love fest”. It also has led him to tell a journalist that he wanted to march to the Capitol that day but that his team had prevented him from doing so.

At a rally in Texas in January 2022, Trump, while teasing his eventual presidential bid, said he would consider pardoning those involved in the assault if he were re-elected – a promise he has often repeated.

A pivotal moment in Trump’s reversal on the attack came six months later. In July 2022, one of his aides, Liz Harrington, reached out to Julie Kelly, a conservative journalist who has written extensively about the Capitol attack and the defendants charged with taking part in it.

Harrington asked what Trump could do “to bail these people out”, Kelly recalled. She replied that while there was little he could do about their bail, Trump should educate himself about the larger legal issues surrounding January 6. Kelly proposed a meeting with Cynthia Hughes, the founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, a prominent January 6 legal defence fund.

Trump’s aides initially baulked at the idea of sitting down with Hughes, Kelly recalled. Hughes’ nephew, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, was facing charges stemming from the Capitol attack, but he was also an avowed Nazi sympathiser who liked to take pictures of himself dressed as Adolf Hitler.

In the end, however, Kelly and Hughes were granted an audience with Trump at Bedminster in September 2022. Kelly said that she told the former president he was not doing enough to support the January 6 defendants and that they felt abandoned by him. The two women also told Trump that some of the federal judges he had put on the bench were “among the worst” when it came to handling the hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack.

After the meeting, Trump gave $10,000 to Hughes’ organisation. About the same time, he told conservative radio host Wendy Bell, “I’m financially supporting people that are incredible, and they were in my office actually two days ago”. Trump later gave a video statement of support at one of the organisation’s fundraising events at a hotel in Washington.

“People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said in the video.

Another issue helped to shape Trump’s thoughts on the Capitol attack and those who took part in it: the spectacle of the televised hearings that were held throughout that summer and fall by the January 6 House committee.

Trump was furious, according to a person with direct knowledge of his thinking, as he watched several of his former aides testify in public about his inability to admit defeat in the 2020 election and his inactivity in the face of the violence on January 6.

How January 6 prisoners became ‘hostages’

Trump’s use of the term “hostages” to describe those charged with taking part in the Capitol attack has been one of his most outlandish attempts to alter the history of January 6. The word, at least as he has used it, expresses little beyond a baseless and distorted view that anyone who has been touched by the criminal justice system because of their roles in the riot has been treated unfairly.

During the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, the number of defendants jailed before their trials has tended to hover at about 5 to 10 per cent of the total number charged. That number has decreased significantly more recently.

The defendants jailed before their trials were among the most violent rioters, accused of shooting a pistol in the air while standing on scaffolding above the mob, plotting to kill the FBI agents who investigated them and other serious crimes.

One of Trump’s associates said they realised that the former president started to use the term “hostages” in the months after he recorded a version of the Star-Spangled Banner with the so-called January 6 Choir, a musical group composed of rioters serving time in the Washington jail. Trump has insisted on playing the song at some of his rallies and has also played it at times at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where, in some cases, diners on the patio rise during the display and put their hands over their hearts.

One of the recording’s producers was Kash Patel, a close aide to Trump who served in a top Defence Department role in the final days of his administration. Through a spokesperson, Patel denied that he had any role in persuading Trump to use the word “hostages” in his speeches.

Last month at a campaign event in Ohio, Trump stood by as an announcer asked the crowd to rise for “the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages”. Then, after saluting as a recording played, Trump repeated the word.

“You see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s where they are, is hostages,” Trump said, adding that the men were also “unbelievable patriots”.

Several critics, including some federal judges who have handled January 6-related cases, have said that legitimising the events of that day increased the risk that something similar could happen again.

A prominent judge in Washington, Royce Lamberth, earlier this month, while sentencing a man who assaulted police on January 6 to more than seven years in prison, worried aloud about January 6 becoming “a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions”.

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“This is not normal,” Lamberth said. “This cannot become normal. We as a community, we as a society, we as a country cannot condone the normalisation of the January 6 Capitol riot.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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