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Trump asserted throughout his 2024 campaign that he would issue sweeping pardons for Jan. 6 convicts. Despite multiple deaths and the widespread injury and property damage at the Capitol, Trump has brazenly tried to rewrite history ever since, declaring that January 6 was an unarmed “love fest” and depicting the perpetrators as “patriots” and “hostages” who have been persecuted.

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Violent far-right groups who backed Trump will be emboldened, says Juliette Kayyem, a former senior DHS official in the Obama administration who directs the Homeland Security Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They will have a narrative of martyrdom, and that’s a really good way to rebuild right-wing terrorist organizations,” she says. “They’ll see it as a win and it will help them recruit people and raise money.” (Notably, as Trump and his allies campaigned nonstop through the fall on phony claims of imminent election fraud, members of the Proud Boys were again preparing for potential violence in support of Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported.)

The looming Jan. 6 pardons are part of a broader picture that includes loyalty tests for Trump’s incoming administration and talk of retribution against his political “enemies,” as he seeks to install highly provocative loyalists atop the FBI and Justice Department. These and other moves build on Trump’s perpetual denial that he lost the 2020 election and serve to distract from the large body of evidence that led DOJ special counsel Jack Smith to charge Trump himself with serious crimes relating to the 2020 election and US national security.

“He wants to erase his election loss and what really happened on January 6,” Kayyem says, warning that Trump may also be setting the stage for white supremacist violence to grow, as it did during his first term in office. “What I worry about isn’t just the nurturing from the Trump White House that says, ‘Yes, this kind of behavior is OK,’ but also the lack of prosecutions of these kinds of behaviors going forward.”

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