ArcaMax

Yes, I was there on Jan. 6, 2021, in the sacred temple of democracy when a mob's deadly rampage darkened democracy and injured 140 police officers in a president's plot to undo the election he lost.

That was the best day of President-elect Donald Trump's life: crowd size, TV ratings, a siege, all of it for three hours. That tragic day burns in my memory.

To skip stones on history's river: The present reminds me of Reconstruction's end, when the meaning of the Civil War got lost in a blizzard of presidential pardons.

But American memory is short.

Four years later, instead of facing crime and punishment, Trump is coming back to crow on that very ground. A day of infamy is recast as a day of glory. The New York Times published: "How Trump Flipped Script and Made Jan. 6 an Asset."

Hundreds of conspirators and marauders in prison may get pardons on "day one" of Trump's return to power. The article reads like a mea culpa. The newspaper of record, the Times, is late to awake: "(T)hey were now political prisoners, hostages, martyrs. Patriots."

Never before had a president incited violence against the government. The day was not chosen by chance. Jan. 6 was the day the Constitution directed Congress to certify the election results. Trump, his advisers and the 30,000 who showed up at his invitation ("will be wild") knew the House and Senate would be sitting ducks, captive in Capitol chambers.

So they broke into the Capitol's doors and windows, swarming the marble terrace designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Trapped in the House chamber, we heard breaking glass, footsteps getting closer, shouts and gunfire. The rioters breached the Senate but not the House. We were lucky to escape down a secret staircase into lockdown.

The bloodshed might have been much worse.

The Trump mob had a list of who they wanted and was thirsty for vengeance, even for the vice president of the United States, Mike Pence. He resisted the president's pressure to go along with the plan. Not for nothing is "retribution," to punish his political opponents, a Trump campaign promise.

Trump means it. He has no humor, irony, self-deprecation or sophisticated charm. He is entirely literal, and for shame, we've failed to take his rants and ramblings seriously.

To paint the parallel, of all presidents, Trump most resembles Andrew Johnson, not Andrew Jackson. A whirlwind of rage, Johnson was barely literate. The former tailor was impeached during his one term (1865-69). Naming the Tennessee senator as vice president was Abraham Lincoln's worst mistake, but he never lived to see all the damage Johnson did.

Lincoln's policy on the post-war period was that Confederate political leaders and military officers -- the elite -- should take a loyalty oath before various states were readmitted to the Union.

This process of disarming the power structure would take some real time. Congress then added teeth to it. Union soldiers would be stationed in Southern states to enforce order and protect freed Black people from violence.

This program, Reconstruction, resembled the Biden presidency after Trump's medical, political and economic shambles.

Lincoln freed millions of enslaved people, yet their fates going forward from the war's end in 1865 was an exceptionally difficult and delicate political task perhaps only he could have resolved. But he was slain in 1865.

Witness: The murderous white supremacist Ku Klux Klan was born in 1865, in Johnson's home state of Tennessee. Soon "Black Codes" in the South were forerunners of Jim Crow segregation and voter suppression.

The Old South was never really conquered, especially with a Southern sympathizer in the White House. Robert E. Lee, symbol of stubborn rebellion, received a pardon, not a treason trial. And Johnson opposed Reconstruction.

Staunch believers in the "Lost Cause" of the war over slavery entered an era of restoration. By spring 1866, Johnson's administration granted 7,000 pardons to ex-Confederates.

The next president, Ulyssess S. Grant, confronted Klan racial violence, as proved by historian Fergus Bordewich (an excellent source on the post-Civil War period, as was John Hope Franklin).

But along came the 1876 election dirty deal: Ohio's Rutherford B. Hayes was made president only if Reconstruction ended in the South. A slew of pardons can betray the truth, then and now.

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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