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On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders that sought to reach into nearly every corner of America life. Yet that was overshadowed by Trump’s unprecedented, sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly all of the roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among those pardoned were high-profile figures convicted of seditious conspiracy and violent assaults that left dozens of police officers injured. Though Trump had promised the move, its broad scope reportedly surprised even members of his inner circle. Just days before being sworn in as vice president, J.D. Vance told reporters that the most violent perpetrators “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.
To help understand the true scope of Trump’s action, on Tuesday I spoke with Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. Ware’s work examines the deep roots of far-right extremism and the importance of the sedition charges that followed Jan. 6 in sending a message of accountability in America. Now, with Trump’s pardons reversing much of that, I asked Ware how he sees this moment. He had a simple response: “We’re in unprecedented territory.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: What was your gut reaction to the news of the pardons?
Jacob Ware: This is pretty devastating moment for counterterrorism in the U.S., particularly counterterrorism against domestic paramilitary groups. It sets a terrible precedent for rule of law, for violence against institutions, violence against law enforcement. And it sends a message of permission—that political violence will be tolerated as long as it’s on behalf of a certain movement and a certain man. And that’s tremendously dangerous. We’re in unprecedented territory where people who sought to overthrow the government have now been allowed back on our streets as returning warriors.
What worries you most about Trump’s action?
Jan. 6 was the largest investigation in Department of Justice history. Those prosecutions were really about two things: punishments of crimes committed and deterring follow-on acts of violence. The consensus among the counterterrorism community is that the deterrence has been completely and fully eroded now.
It’s not just because of the pardons. In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, even the most conservative Republicans were horrified. Elise Stefanik called for people to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Over the course of the past four years, that narrative has been steadily eroded as Jan. 6 defendants have been recast and redefined from insurrectionists to martyrs, political prisoners, victims, hostages. At one point, President Trump even used the word “warriors,” a word that actually celebrates organized state violence. And so the concern is there is now no deterrence against political violence from this particular movement.
What was the anticipation in the online extremism world heading into the Trump inauguration? What is the reaction to these broad pardons?
We know that countless individuals who are enmeshed in these criminal cases were trying to delay or postpone trials, waiting for Trump’s inauguration, truly believing that he was going to protect them from the criminal justice system. This has been an ongoing dance that we’ve seen over the course of the past eight years, where President Trump would issue these public proclamations of support condoning these movements. We saw that at Charlottesville, and with the Proud Boys “stand back and stand by” comment. And we know from statements that these groups make from the chatter within their online spaces that they do take his words and his actions to be supportive of them. It was barely months between “stand back and stand by” and the Jan. 6 insurrection. So they were waiting for this moment, and they will be celebrating their freedom.
I should also point out that Jan. 6 was an incident that had a huge variety of activity. You did have people who were involved in nonviolent crimes, trespassing crimes, and they served very short prison sentences, if they served prison sentences at all. And then you had people prosecuted for very violent crimes, including seditious conspiracy, which is arguably the most serious crime in our country. I think even the most conservative Republicans did not expect President Trump to pardon or commute the sentences of those prosecuted for seditious conspiracy. So that is also a big shock. The people the Justice Department proved had intended to overthrow the government have now been protected and condoned by President Trump. That is a big deal.
As the people convicted of Jan. 6 crimes start getting out of prison, what will you be watching? Do you think most of them will try to fade into ordinary life, or is there a chance they will jump back into organizing or activism?
You have two kinds of Jan. 6 defendants. You have those who recognize that they were duped and are genuinely remorseful. Those are the kind of people who I hope will be given the space to rebuild their lives. You also have those who acted out on Jan. 6 because they had a grievance against the government. And that victimhood has now been propelled further. They feel they now have more evidence that they are struggling against a tyrannical government. Certainly, I would expect those people to double down in their activism and go back to their paramilitary and militia groups as battle-hardened leaders who now can speak with authority about the violence against the government that they’ve been promising all these years. I do think this will be a shot in the arm for the movement and for several groups who had been relatively dormant since Jan. 6.
Since President Trump first emerged on the political stage, he has redefined what we once called anti-government extremism. These kinds of movements—the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys—used to be fundamentally opposed to all governments or federal authority in the United States. That has changed now. They’ve been recast as anti-Democratic and pro-Republican, because they feel that President Trump is an ally in the White House. Because President Trump has shifted the Overton window, whether we see those people enter the political process or continue in their violent activism remains to be seen.
I would also not be surprised to see some people use that to propel political careers as well. The narrative has been rewritten. Jan. 6 perpetrators are no longer violent insurrectionists. They are now peaceful patriots who were victimized by the government. And that is going to be something very powerful for people who decide to run for office, much as it was an honorable thing to have been a prisoner of war.
What about the Proud Boys specifically? What do you think Enrique Tarrio’s release could mean for the group’s future?
Enrique Tarrio has a long, checkered history of cooperation, which of course is not looked upon very positively by the movement. He’s going back with this sense of legitimacy and authority because he is somebody who has personal experience of “government tyranny” in quotation marks; he stared down an overreaching tyrannical government and won. I think that’s going to be an incredibly powerful narrative that he’s going to be able to spin, which can make him a very powerful figure in whatever the next generation of the violent far right is. This pardon will be taken as a stamp of approval by the movement, and he’s going to become a poster child for it.
The violent far right has always been exceptional at weaving this narrative of martyrdom and hailing those people who have been felled at the hands of the government as martyrs. And these people will now carry that authority with them forever. Whether Tarrio determines that he’s going to go deeper into the movement and rebuild it for this golden age in the second Trump administration, or whether he decides to do something more productive with his life, it remains to be seen.
Has anything of this scale happened before?
I’m thinking a lot about historical parallels. In 1988, the U.S. government tried 14 white supremacists for seditious conspiracy at Fort Smith, Arkansas. And those 14 white supremacists were acquitted. It was a huge deal for the movement because they felt they had approval. But one of them, a former KKK leader called Louis Beam, realized that the entire movement had almost been decapitated. So, he went underground, formed this journal called the Seditionists, in reference to the charges, and he revived an old treatise of insurgency and guerrilla warfare known as leaderless resistance, basically lone-actor terrorism. And most of the violence that we’ve seen from the far right over the past decade—in places like Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo—have actually followed this model.
I don’t know whether the movement is going to say Jan. 6 was proof of concept for leaderless resistance, because when they organized publicly, the government was able to decapitate the movement temporarily, or whether they see that as a success now that they have infiltrated the mainstream. I can see it going either way. I think certainly we will see both groups and individuals acting with more of a sense of invincibility because they attacked the United States government.
How does this moment stack up against other pivotal points in your work studying domestic extremism?
We’re in unprecedented territory. The success of the seditious conspiracy charges a couple of years ago was a really important moment because the government had made up for the mistakes that they made in 1988. For the first time, arguably since the Civil War, the United States government had proven without question that groups that organize against the government on behalf of white supremacist and anti-government ideologies were attempting to overthrow the government. And that was a significant deal, not just legally, but also in terms of deterrence and building a democratic norm against violence. All of that has now been destroyed.
It is fundamentally a rewriting of the norm against violence in democracies. That will affect our own battle here against domestic terrorism, but I think it also has implications abroad. Right now, in Washington, D.C., our national security bureaucracy is obsessed with great power competition, obsessed with strategic competition against China and Russia, and our allies and adversaries are watching crucial democratic norms be undermined in the alleged city on a hill, the United States. And that has impacts abroad. In fact, we saw that in Brazil in January 2023 when an election riot struck that capital city. It’s not just an unprecedented impact for our own battle against domestic terrorism, but it also deeply affects American soft power and American foreign policy at a critical moment. I really think this is a transformational day for American national security and American counterterrorism, if not for American democracy writ large.
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