Within the early-morning hours of January 5, 2021, Thomas Webster, a former U.S. Marine and retired police officer, drove south on Interstate 95 towards Washington, D.C. Webster, who was then 54, had been conflicted about whether or not to attend the “Save America” rally, however Donald Trump had used the phrase patriot. Webster had joined the navy at 19, taken his first aircraft experience as well camp in South Carolina, gotten his first style of lobster tail on a ship within the Mediterranean. He cherished the sense of goal he’d drawn from the oath he’d sworn when he joined the Marines: I’ll assist and defend the Structure of the US towards all enemies, overseas and home.
Webster, who’d retired from the New York Metropolis Police Division, the place he’d been a avenue cop, a firearms teacher, and a part of the Gracie Mansion safety element, lived in Goshen, New York, together with his spouse, Michelle, an Ivy League graduate who labored in biotech gross sales, and their three youngsters, certainly one of whom had not too long ago joined the Marines. He ran a small enterprise, Semper Fi Landscaping, chopping grass and clearing snow throughout winter.
Within the early days of the pandemic, Webster had masked in public, disinfected his groceries, and slept within the basement if he had the slightest sniffle. At first he thought protecting his youngsters house from college made sense. However because the months stretched on, he fearful about his two youthful youngsters, who didn’t appear to be socializing or studying a lot over Zoom. One morning that spring, when Webster went exterior to mow a neighbor’s garden, he discovered himself troubled by the surreal silence on his block, like he was standing on a vacant film set.
When Webster turned on the information, the world appeared the wrong way up. He noticed hundreds of thousands of individuals flouting COVID restrictions to protest the killing of George Floyd. He grew to become suspicious about what the federal government and the mainstream media had been telling him. In the summertime of 2020, he puzzled over how CNN and different information retailers might describe the Black Lives Matter protests as “principally peaceable” whereas broadcasting discordant pictures—as an example, the flames from buildings burning orange towards the night time sky.
Throughout that first yr of COVID isolation, Webster consumed extra information than he ever had and grew irritated by what he considered as proliferating authorities intrusions into individuals’s lives. New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, issued early stay-at-home orders, imposed one of many first statewide masks mandates, and discouraged in-person church providers. As time handed, Webster discovered his views diverging from a few of his neighbors’ within the Hudson Valley. When college students had been finally allowed to return to highschool, his youngsters had been among the many few who climbed again onto the varsity bus. This was when he thought he seen neighbors him in another way, as if they disapproved. Again in 2015, when Trump had begun his presidential marketing campaign, Webster hadn’t taken him significantly, as a result of he “mentioned some crazy-ass stuff.” Webster considered himself as a standard, small-government, libertarian-leaning Reagan Republican; he’d supported Ted Cruz within the 2016 Republican major. Now, although, he started to seek out Trump’s bombast refreshing. Within the president’s phrases, Webster heard echoes of his personal ideas concerning the strangulating overreach of an authoritarian authorities. A few of what Trump mentioned about overseas coverage additionally started to resonate with Webster, significantly his statements about wanting America to stop its “without end wars,” as a result of he fearful about his daughter within the Marines.
Over the course of 2020, Webster discovered himself pulled increasingly deeply into the MAGA camp. The idea of “Make America Nice Once more” appeared fairly sensible to him. Who might argue with it? Webster had been upset to see the Obama administration go on what he thought was an limitless apology tour world wide. Trump, in distinction, embraced the nation and was unabashed in placing America first. “I actually appreciated that,” Webster instructed me not too long ago. “I didn’t view MAGA as ‘extremism.’ I considered it as a way of patriotism, a love of God and household and nation.”
Because the pandemic and the 2020 election marketing campaign wore on, Webster drifted additional and additional to the fitting. When he grew to become disenchanted with even Fox Information for being too average, and particularly for its choice to name Arizona for Joe Biden so early on Election Evening, he started turning as a substitute to Newsmax and One America Information Community. He migrated from far-right websites comparable to Breitbart Information, The Federalist, and Gateway Pundit to smaller, even-further-right boards that pulsed with conspiratorial outrage.
When Trump claimed that the election had been stolen, Webster was inclined to consider him. He examine a Postal Service subcontractor who mentioned that he’d pushed 24 bins of accomplished mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in a tractor trailer early one morning about two weeks earlier than Election Day, suggesting that they’d been improperly moved throughout state strains. He noticed pictures of ballot staff in Detroit masking home windows, which implied to him that they had been concealing electoral skulduggery. He watched a video of ballot staff in Georgia pulling what Trump known as “suitcases” of ballots from beneath a desk after election observers had gone house. Based mostly on every thing he was seeing, Webster didn’t discover it so far-fetched {that a} cornerstone of democracy—a free and truthful election—had been compromised. He believed Trump when he mentioned that Democrats had been utilizing the pandemic to push using mail-in ballots with a view to perpetrate widespread voter fraud. After the election outcomes had been in, when Trump requested how Biden—who, in keeping with the president, had been “hiding” in his basement and couldn’t put two sentences collectively—had one way or the other gained 81 million votes, Webster needed to agree that was awfully suspicious.
Trump had been sowing doubts concerning the integrity of the election since earlier than the voting even began. “The one means they”—the Democrats—“are going to win is by a rigged election,” he mentioned at a rally in August, and he repeated this sentiment again and again within the weeks main as much as November 3. After midnight on Election Evening, whereas the votes had been nonetheless being counted, Trump mentioned, “Frankly, we did win this election.” As quickly because the votes had been lastly all tabulated and the race was declared for Biden, Trump started casting doubt and scheming to overturn the consequence.
On December 14, the chief of the Oath Keepers, the right-wing paramilitary group, printed an open letter on their web site urging Trump to invoke the Riot Act with a view to block the switch of energy to Biden utilizing navy power. “When you fail to behave,” the letter mentioned, “we the individuals should combat a bloody civil battle and revolution.” 5 days later, Trump urged his supporters to attend a rally in Washington on January 6, the day the Electoral Faculty vote was to be licensed. “Can be wild!” he tweeted. MAGA supporters embraced the invitation. Social media and pro-Trump dialogue boards teemed with individuals saying they had been planning to “storm the Capitol” on January 6. A lot of them declared that they might be armed.
Earlier than 2021, the January 6 electoral certification had typically been a professional forma affair. By the point certification occurs, the favored vote has lengthy been counted, the Electoral Faculty totals formally known as. However Trump and a few of his aides had been plotting with a couple of far-right Republicans within the Home of Representatives to stymie the proceedings. Through the certification course of, members of Congress have the chance to object to a state’s outcomes, which triggers debate after which a vote about whether or not the objection is to be upheld. However within the 133 years that this certification course of had been the legislation, no objection had ever been sustained. Trump and his coterie meant to alter that by pressuring legislators, and Vice President Mike Pence, to uphold objections to sure states’ votes. “The Vice President has the ability to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” the president tweeted on January 5. Trump supporters received the message: Exterior strain would assist. If “1,000,000 patriots” present up “bristling with AR’s”—assault rifles—“simply how courageous do you suppose” legislators might be “on the subject of imposing their unconstitutional legal guidelines?” somebody posted on thedonald.win, a well-liked pro-Trump web site. “Don’t cuck out. That is do or die. Carry your weapons.” Different posts echoed this.
As Trump amplified requires his supporters to assemble in Washington to “cease the steal,” Webster instructed his spouse that he wanted to go. Anxious about antifa counterprotesters, he packed his NYPD-issued bulletproof vest, together with his blood kind, A+, written on the within; he crammed his military-issued rucksack with water, Gatorade, and Meals Prepared-to-Eat (MREs). He took a Smith & Wesson revolver, sufficiently small to slot in his pocket, and heat garments, together with a snow jacket with distinctive crimson, black, and white stripes. As he traveled south in his Honda CR-V, he was a person infused with goal, a patriot answering a president’s plea for assist.
The subsequent afternoon, January 6, Noah Rathbun, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Division of Washington, D.C., stood behind a bike-rack barricade on the west aspect of the U.S. Capitol as a hostile and rising crowd closed in.
Although Rathbun, a U.S. Navy veteran, had been with MPD for 5 years, he’d by no means been to the Capitol. After becoming a member of the division, he’d been assigned to the Seventh District, which incorporates high-crime neighborhoods in Southeast D.C. However he was additionally a member of one of many division’s civil-disturbance models, and that morning his unit had been deployed close to the White Home. Round 1 p.m., when officers on the Capitol started radioing for assist, his unit drove patrol vehicles towards the advanced’s western finish. Surveying the scene that confronted him there, Rathbun had by no means confronted so many offended individuals, a mass of humanity that rippled out so far as he might see. He wore a helmet, a gasoline masks, a fluorescent-yellow jacket, and a physique digital camera that recorded the gang.
Earlier that day, Trump had begun his morning by as soon as once more exhorting Pence, who would oversee the election-certification course of, to overturn Biden’s victory. “Do it Mike, this can be a time for excessive braveness!” he tweeted. Simply earlier than midday, the president started talking to the hundreds of supporters he had summoned to the Ellipse. “We gained this election, and we gained it by a landslide,” he mentioned. After telling them to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, with a view to give Republicans the braveness to reject the certification, he shifted to inflaming them: “We combat. We combat like hell. And in the event you don’t combat like hell, you’re not going to have a rustic anymore.” He instructed them to stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, the place Congress was starting the certification proceedings, and mentioned that he would go along with them. (He didn’t go along with them.) At 2:11, the rioters breached the Capitol constructing. Two minutes later, the Secret Service whisked Pence off the Senate ground.
President Donald Trump speaks to hundreds of supporters on January 6, 2021,
repeating his spurious claims of election fraud and inspiring a march on the Capitol.
At 2:18, a girl carrying a Trump face masks and holding a Trump flag on a pole tried to push by means of the barricade that Rathbun was manning. He put his hand on the lady’s shoulder and shoved her again as they tussled over the flagpole. The lady fell to the bottom, upsetting the gang. On body-cam footage, you may see one protester sq. his shoulders in a confrontational posture, and one other increase what seems like a cane into the air as a police officer tries to douse them with chemical spray.
Somebody lobbed what appeared like a cylindrical Bluetooth speaker into the air. It hit Rathbun within the chest. As he tried to reattach the barricade, which the gang had dislodged, the lady reappeared. Rathbun put each fingers on her chest and pushed her again, and she or he once more fell down. Shortly after that, a bearded man, studying the officer’s title on his uniform, raised his fingers within the air and mentioned, “Rathbun, settle down. No person’s going to harm you.”
One other man, carrying what tactical goggles, pointed his finger at Rathbun and mentioned to the bearded man: “He hit the lady.”
Bearded man: “I do know.”
“He’s able to punch a girl within the face,” the person with goggles mentioned, making an uppercut movement. “I handled Afghan ladies with far more respect than that.”
Rathbun responded by opening and shutting his fingers and thumb like Pac-Man’s mouth, showing to convey the common image for blah blah blah.
As the gang blew air horns and chanted “U.S.A.!,” the bearded man requested Rathbun, “Do you’re keen on America, Rathbun? Do you’re keen on your nation, son?”
Rathbun stared ahead, his hand resting on the barricade, the ultimate barrier between the gang and the Capitol’s western entrance. The nation’s legislators had been gathered inside, certifying Biden’s election. Rathbun understood that his job was to guard these legislators. The barricades had been flimsy and unanchored. He put his foot on the underside of 1, attempting to stabilize it. Earlier than lengthy, one other man appeared earlier than Rathbun. “Y’all know what’s proper and what’s flawed. I do know you’re simply doing what’s proper, doing all of your job, and we hope that Pence does his job,” the person mentioned. “My vote received disenfranchised by hundreds of votes. Hundreds of useless individuals voted. These useless individuals are not right here. I’m right here.”
It was round this second that Trump tweeted that Pence—then being evacuated to a safe location as some individuals within the mob chanted “Hold Mike Pence!”—lacked the “braveness” to reject Biden’s certification.
At 2:28, a person in a crimson, black, and white snow jacket—Tom Webster—pushed his method to the entrance of the gang. He carried a big metallic pole with a crimson Marine Corps flag on it. He pointed his index finger at Rathbun and yelled: “You fucking piece of shit! You fucking commie motherfuckers, man. You’re gonna assault Individuals? No, fuck that!” As Webster repeatedly jabbed his finger, Rathbun met it together with his left hand, as if attempting to swat him away. As Webster continued aggressively yelling, Rathbun reached over the barricade and shoved him again. Webster mentioned, “You fucking commie fuck. Come on, take your shit off”—one thing individuals say to a cop after they wish to combat.
Webster reached down and shoved the barricade towards Rathbun. It slid simply throughout the concrete, creating a niche between it and the subsequent barricade. Rathbun reached out to shove Webster again and struck him within the head with an open palm. The blow additional infected Webster, who raised his flagpole into the air and swung it down repeatedly in a chopping movement, hitting the barricade with a loud clang.
Rathbun and the opposite officers tried to reconnect the barricades however couldn’t, and the gang surged ahead. As Rathbun and different officers retreated, Webster clenched each fists, crouched right into a linebacker’s stance, and charged into Rathbun, knocking him to the bottom. As the 2 males wrestled, Webster tugged on Rathbun’s helmet, pulling the chin strap tighter round his neck, to the purpose the place, Rathbun later testified, he struggled to breathe. Webster pulled the officer’s gasoline masks partway off and pressed his fingers near his eyes. Rathbun tried to stand up however couldn’t, feeling as if somebody within the crowd was kicking him. After about 10 seconds, Webster stood and disappeared into the gang flooding by means of the breach he’d helped create.
Shortly afterward, somebody filmed Webster standing towards a wall on the Capitol, his eyes crimson from tear gasoline. Stepping away from the wall and looking out into the digital camera, he mentioned: “Ship extra patriots. We’d like some assist.”
As Webster drove house to New York that night time, he wasn’t precisely pumping his fist over what had occurred, however he wasn’t stuffed with remorse, both. He felt justified in what he’d finished. He believed that Officer Rathbun had provoked him, gesturing him to return nearer and combat. (Rathbun denied this in court docket testimony, saying he had “completely not” made such a gesture. He didn’t reply to requests for remark.) Webster thought again to how when he’d arrived on the Capitol grounds, he’d seen an aged couple leaving, the lady’s face lined in blood. The picture had troubled him. Americans had gone to the Capitol to precise their First Modification rights, solely to seek out themselves assaulted by the police? Webster says he thinks of himself as a “protector,” so seeing that lady put him right into a rage, which was the state he was in when he approached Rathbun on the police barrier.
As he absorbed information protection over the remainder of that week, nevertheless, he was shocked by its tenor. He’d thought the January 6 crowd can be considered the best way the Black Lives Matter protesters had been—as a principally peaceable group with a righteous trigger. A couple of dangerous actors, to make certain, however he wasn’t amongst them.
However he shortly realized that many Individuals considered January 6 protesters like him not as patriots however as home terrorists. A lot of the commentary Webster now noticed on-line centered on white supremacy and featured pictures of protesters holding Accomplice flags. Even Trump appeared to briefly forsake them, calling their intrusion on the Capitol a “heinous assault” that had “defiled the seat of American democracy.” As politicians in each events warned that lawbreakers within the crowd would pay, Webster suppressed a pang of worry.
He seesawed forwards and backwards as he surveyed the proof. He watched footage of a person hurling a hearth extinguisher at a bunch of law enforcement officials. Okay, that clearly crossed the road, Webster thought. Then he watched clips of the Air Power veteran and MAGA devotee Ashli Babbitt getting shot as she climbed by means of a window into the Speaker’s Foyer resulting in the Home Chamber, and he felt outraged by what he considered as her homicide.
Webster realized that the FBI, media organizations, and beginner web sleuths had been utilizing facial-recognition software program to determine those that’d stormed the Capitol. His anxiousness elevated when he heard that federal brokers had begun kicking down the doorways of recognized January 6 protesters. A good friend instructed Webster that his image was circulating on-line. One night as he lay in mattress, his spouse’s cellphone rang. His brother-in-law spoke so loudly that Webster might hear what he mentioned: “Tom goes viral on Twitter.” His spouse checked out Webster, involved. “What do you imply?” she requested.
Retired NYPD Officer Tom Webster on January 6, 2021, wielding the flagpole he used to assault MPD Officer Noah Rathbun.
Webster at the moment, at house in Mississippi. He served two years in jail in Texas earlier than Trump’s blanket pardon led to his launch.
Her brother texted {a photograph} that he’d discovered trending on-line beneath the hashtag #eyegouger, exhibiting Webster showing to thrust his fingers in a police officer’s face. Webster had already instructed his spouse about his combat, explaining that the cop had struck him first. Now he once more insisted that he’d been provoked, however his brother-in-law sounded uncertain. No matter you say, dude.
Panicked, Webster went to see the priest at his Catholic church. The clergyman linked Webster with one other church member who was a criminal-defense lawyer. He and Webster organized to satisfy with the FBI.
Within the spring of 2022, Webster sat on the protection desk in a federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. Authorized wrangling forward of the trial had stretched out over 14 months, whereas attorneys and law-enforcement brokers pored over a whole bunch of pages of filings, stories, and statements, and watched scores of video clips. 5 attorneys argued the case—three for the federal government, two for Webster. Jurors heard from 12 witnesses: three U.S. Capitol Law enforcement officials, one MPD officer, one Secret Service agent, three FBI brokers, a Safeway grocery-store district supervisor (who testified about how a lot the violence on January 6 had suppressed enterprise), two longtime pals of Webster’s, and a former NYPD officer with whom he’d attended the police academy. Jurors additionally heard straight from Webster and Rathbun, each of whom testified for a number of hours, and repeatedly watched footage of their altercation from a number of angles. The court docket reporters’ transcription of the proceedings consumed greater than 1,000 typed pages.
Throughout closing arguments, a prosecutor urged the jurors to depend on what they’d seen with their very own eyes. He repeated this six occasions, the final time as a query: “What did your eyes let you know?”
After a trial lasting 5 days, jurors deliberated for lower than three hours earlier than discovering Webster responsible on all six counts he’d been charged with, together with essentially the most severe felony: assaulting a police officer with a harmful weapon, for violently swinging his flagpole a number of occasions at Rathbun. On the sentencing, in September, a prosecutor acknowledged that individuals like Webster may need been pawns in a political recreation, however added: “Even when he didn’t know higher than to consider Trump’s lies, he knew higher than to assault a fellow cop, regardless of the circumstances.”
Webster’s protection lawyer had argued in a presentencing submitting that judging his consumer’s character based mostly solely on January 6 was like “judging the ocean by a jugful of its water.”
“The court docket doesn’t see loads of Tom Websters,” the lawyer, James E. Monroe, instructed the decide. “In my profession, I don’t get an opportunity to signify many Tom Websters, somebody who’s had such a glowing profession and makes such an ideal catastrophe of his private {and professional} life by seconds of stupidity.” He mentioned that Webster got here to D.C. on the invitation “of a president that was determined to retain energy. And like many different Individuals, he accepted that invitation. And as we’ve specified by our personal papers, the lies and disinformation had been ample to idiot many Individuals, particularly those that confirmed up right here on the Capitol on January 6.” He additionally scolded the federal government for looking for an extended jail time period for Webster, who’d by no means earlier than had any authorized hassle and who had served his nation and New York honorably as a Marine and a police officer; he known as the proposed sentence “an act of vengeance versus a prayer for justice.”
Webster rose to talk. He instructed the decide that he’d grow to be swept up in politics and Trump’s rhetoric. He mentioned he wished he’d by no means gone to D.C. that day. He turned and addressed the police officer he’d assaulted, who was sitting within the courtroom gallery: “Officer Rathbun, I’m sorry.”
U.S. District Choose Amit P. Mehta, an Obama appointee, agreed that for 25 years, Webster had been “a public servant within the truest sense of the phrase,” an on a regular basis American who now discovered himself substantial jail time. However though he’d watched the video of Webster attacking the cop many occasions, Mehta mentioned, “I nonetheless stay shocked each single time I see it.” Webster, he mentioned, had contributed to certainly one of America’s darkest days: “We can’t operate as a rustic if individuals suppose they will behave violently after they lose an election.” Mehta believed that Webster had constructed an alternate reality about what occurred that day, one which was “totally fanciful and unimaginable.”
Earlier than sentencing Webster to 10 years in jail, Mehta instructed that understanding his actions on January 6 required a wider lens. The decide posited {that a} man like Webster doesn’t do what he did except he’s “delivered to a spot the place his thoughts and his in any other case sense of equilibrium, his patriotism, his sense of self are misplaced.”
“Individuals must ask themselves what situations might have created that to occur,” Mehta mentioned, “and be sincere with your self if you’re asking the query and answering it.”
After Webster turned himself in at a low-security jail in Texas on October 13, 2022, inmates shortly found that he was a former cop. When he sat down for his first meal within the chow corridor, one other inmate ordered him to go and sit with the “SOs”—the intercourse offenders.
However what was even more durable for Webster to take care of was the information that individuals didn’t see him the best way he’d seen himself on January 6—as a patriot. Even his youngsters, who’d at all times appeared as much as him as the daddy who mounted their bikes and deliberate household tenting journeys, appeared unhappy and puzzled, as if now not sure about who he was.
Within the days instantly following the rebellion, the nation appeared nearly unified in settlement that what had occurred on the Capitol was violent and darkish. “The violence, destruction, and chaos we noticed earlier was unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” Republican Home Minority Chief Kevin McCarthy mentioned from the Home ground simply hours after the assault had subsided, including that January 6 was “the saddest day I’ve ever had serving as a member of this establishment.” The subsequent week, the Home voted to question Trump, and in February the Senate voted 57–43 to convict him, with seven Republicans becoming a member of all 50 Democrats find him responsible of “incitement of rebellion.” Though this fell 10 votes wanting the two-thirds majority crucial for conviction, polls confirmed {that a} clear majority of Individuals believed Trump bore accountability for the rebellion. He was successfully banned from all the most important social-media platforms, and huge companies declared that they might now not make monetary contributions to politicians who had supported Trump’s election lies. Even the longtime Republican kingmaker Rupert Murdoch, who was then the chair of Fox Company, declared, in an electronic mail to certainly one of his former executives, “We wish to make Trump a non individual.” The president appeared to be heading towards political exile, his election claims destined to be inscribed in historical past as treasonous lies.
However inside hours of the assault on the Capitol, an alternate narrative was already forming. On her present the night of January 6, the Fox Information host Laura Ingraham questioned aloud whether or not antifa sympathizers had infiltrated the gang. Earlier than lengthy, a refrain of conservative-media personalities, far-right lawmakers, and members of the family of rioters was suggesting that the stories of savagery had been overblown; that the occasions of that day had been extra peaceable protest than violent rebellion; that the actual rebellion had been on November 3, when the election was stolen.
By March, Trump was telling Ingraham stay on Fox Information that the gang had posed “zero risk proper from the beginning” and that protesters had been “hugging and kissing” the police. By the autumn, Trump and different distinguished MAGA figures had been often referring to the rioters turned defendants as “patriots” and “political hostages.” January 6, Trump would later say, was “a day of affection.” Information clips featured residents of the “Patriot Pod,” a unit on the D.C. jail that housed January 6 defendants, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” each night time—and earlier than lengthy, Trump was enjoying a recording of their rendition initially of his political rallies. On his Fox Information present a yr after the rebellion, Tucker Carlson mentioned, “January 6 barely charges as a footnote. Actually not rather a lot occurred that day, if you concentrate on it.” Consultant Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana, has mentioned, “The entire thing was a nefarious agenda to entrap MAGA Individuals.” Shortly after the primary anniversary of January 6, Trump talked about the potential of pardoning the defendants if he had been reelected. By March 2024, in the course of the presidential marketing campaign, he was saying that certainly one of his first acts in workplace can be to “free the January 6 Hostages”; in December of that yr, after he gained the election, he mentioned he would concern the pardons on his “first day.”
From his cell in Texas, Webster tried to tune out information concerning the election, the potential pardons, and the J6ers typically, not eager to get his hopes up. Had the nation remained coalesced across the correct authentic understanding of January 6—that Americans had been lied to concerning the 2020 election by the president and had tried to sack the Capitol partly at his instigation—Webster may need been compelled right into a reckoning. As a substitute, he’d been introduced with a extra interesting framing that squared higher together with his view of himself as a patriot and an excellent individual: He and different Individuals had gone to Washington merely to petition their authorities about questionable election outcomes and, whereas there, had been baited by antifa or undercover federal brokers into storming the Capitol. This, in flip, strengthened Webster’s personal preliminary declare about his combat with the MPD cop—that Rathbun had provoked the encounter by placing him within the head, then lied about it to counter Webster’s righteous assertion of self-defense, leading to his wrongful conviction.
When Trump formally introduced one other run for president, in November 2022, it solidified every thing Webster believed about Trump—that he was a fighter, that he cherished America, that he wouldn’t be cowed. Regardless of all that the federal government had finished to Trump, together with impeaching him twice, the ex-president remained unyielding.
On Election Evening in November 2024, Webster sat within the jail tv room, watching the outcomes. By the point he returned to his cell for the inmate head depend at 9 p.m., Florida had been known as for Trump. Webster spent the subsequent few hours mendacity on his bunk at the hours of darkness, listening to the radio as newscasters known as North Carolina for Trump, then Georgia, then Pennsylvania, then the election. Webster drifted off to sleep, stuffed with hope.
For the subsequent few weeks, he questioned whether or not Trump would maintain his phrase about pardoning the J6ers on his first day again in workplace. He fearful that Trump may pardon solely a number of the 1,600 defendants, and never the supposedly violent ones like him. Or perhaps Trump would wait till the tip of his time period, to keep away from any political warmth. For Webster, that may imply persevering with to languish in jail for years.
On Inauguration Day, Webster was anxious. He watched the ceremonies for a couple of hours, then went again to his cell to relaxation. Later that night, a jail guard known as out: “Webster! Get all the way down to the lieutenant’s workplace proper now.” Simply earlier than midnight, he stepped into the chilly Texas night time, a free man.
The Metropolitan Police Division in Washington, D.C., requires practically all of its 3,200 officers to work inaugurations, usually one of many longest and most boring days of their profession; many calculate how shut they’re to retirement by what number of extra inaugurations they nonetheless should work.
In January of final yr, a whole bunch of MPD officers who had been on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, had been working to safeguard Donald Trump’s second inauguration. To Officer Daniel Hodges, the expertise was surreal: The final time he’d seen so many individuals carrying MAGA hats, they’d been attempting to kill him.
On that day 5 years in the past, Hodges had reported for responsibility at dawn as a part of a civil-disturbance unit, CDU 42. The group (25 officers, 4 sergeants, and one lieutenant) was specifically skilled in riot techniques: the way to deploy giant canisters of chemical spray; the way to shoot rubber bullets from 40-millimeter launchers; the way to carry out extractions—quick, focused operations to take away individuals from hazard. However on that day, January 6, platoon members appeared like typical patrol officers, standing in navy-blue uniforms alongside the blocks of Structure Avenue resulting in the Ellipse, the place Trump was holding his rally. Supervisors had not licensed them to put on riot gear, which was stashed in close by vans, or carry munitions. They’d been instructed that their task was merely to be seen.
Hodges watched the gang stream by, noting {that a} vital quantity wore tactical gear comparable to helmets, goggles, and ballistic vests—not the type of accoutrements individuals usually put on to peaceably take heed to speeches. Round 11 a.m., a big crowd started streaming again towards the Capitol. Round 1 p.m., the U.S. Capitol Police summoned MPD for assist; protesters had been attacking officers, crashing by means of barricades, and climbing scaffolding that had been erected prematurely of the inauguration. An MPD commander ordered CDU 42 to the Capitol for backup.
Somewhat after 1:30 p.m., Hodges and different officers stood exterior their vans placing on hard-shell protecting pads that lined their shoulders, shins, and different bones. They listened as a veteran MPD commander on the Capitol started to sound extra determined over the police radio. Officers, some not but in full gear, rushed into two scout vehicles and 4 vans, and sped towards the Capitol. Solely two officers had managed to tug on their protecting coveralls, stretchy black fits that appear like onesies and protect them from flames and chemical spray.
On the northwest aspect of the Capitol, Hodges and different officers organized themselves in a two-column formation as a sergeant known as out orders: “Shields down! Cameras on!” As they marched towards the Capitol, Hodges famous that his platoon mates, who had labored many protests collectively, had been grim and silent, as if nervous about what they had been about to come across. Many had by no means labored on the Capitol and had no thought the place to go. An officer on the scene led them towards the West Terrace. As they drew nearer, a loud roar crammed the air. Taking within the crowd, Hodges noticed that law enforcement officials had been preposterously outnumbered. Every put a hand on the shoulder of the officer in entrance of them, they usually marched into the dense, roiling horde, so thick that the 2 columns had been compelled to break down right into a single line. Quickly the scene devolved into particular person battles between officers and rioters.
Police attempt to defend the Capitol towards Trump supporters making an attempt to disrupt the election-certification course of.
One rioter tried to tear the baton from Hodges’s hand as he took blows from all sides. One other man, who wore a ballistic vest that bulged with thick protecting plates, as if ready for heavy gunfire, requested, “Are you my brother?” One other mentioned, “You’ll die in your knees.” A rioter who’d climbed up scaffolding tossed down one thing heavy, hitting Hodges within the head. One other man tried to take Hodges’s baton they usually fell to the bottom, the person kicking Hodges within the chest as they wrestled. Hodges managed to hold on to his baton however then discovered himself on all fours, surrounded by the mob, terrified that he would quickly be torn aside.
With the assistance of colleagues who materialized round him, Hodges managed to face again up, and he and different platoon members fought their means by means of the gang, arriving on the police line in varied states of dishevelment. They joined different officers on the West Terrace and tried to maintain the gang at bay. Standing there, Hodges struggled to soak up a scene of jarring dissonance: somebody waving a flag with Trump’s head atop Rambo’s physique; the regular, warlike pounding of a single drum; one offended protester demanding, “I wish to converse to a supervisor!” Absolutely the entitlement of those individuals, Hodges thought. As minutes handed, Hodges felt as if he might really feel the shift and stream of the gang’s power, a push of aggression adopted by an unsteady lull. A person appeared earlier than Hodges and shouted, “Do you suppose your little peashooter weapons are going to cease this crowd?” Hodges scanned individuals’s fingers for weapons and knives, attempting to calculate when and whether or not to make use of power, the way to use simply sufficient to cease the gang however not inflame it, how any motion he took may look in a while video.
Horrified, he watched the gang burst by means of the police line. An MPD commander shouted over the radio: “We’ve misplaced the road! All MPD, pull again!” Two males pushed Hodges towards a wall; one man reached beneath his protecting visor and dug into his proper eye together with his thumb. Hodges cried out in ache, and managed to shake the person off earlier than his eye was completely broken.
Standing close to the steps of the Capitol, attempting to carry again the marauders, Hodges felt that the job was futile: He would combat off one man, and one other 20 would seem. Hodges retreated with different officers contained in the constructing. A high-ranking MPD commander, Ramey Kyle, known as out, “It’s gonna be old-school CDU”—civil-disturbance unit—“if they arrive in these doorways, do you hear me?” Officers took that to imply that this was no time for the reform-minded policing of latest years; this combat can be arduous and violent. “We aren’t dropping the U.S. Capitol at the moment!” Kyle shouted.
One other officer known as out for Hodges’s platoon: “42, come on!” Bracing himself to rejoin the battle, Hodges headed towards the Decrease West Terrace tunnel, arriving at a darkish concrete hallway about 10 toes large. There, Hodges noticed a couple of dozen officers in a haze of smoke—rows of 4 or 5 stacked shoulder to shoulder—struggling to carry off the a whole bunch of protesters who’d already breached two units of doorways. Behind these a whole bunch, hundreds extra swarmed. The officers believed theirs to be the final line of protection defending the Capitol. They didn’t know that rioters had already entered the constructing on the northwest aspect.
Police and the mass of protesters battled for inches. The attackers swayed forwards and backwards, their our bodies working as battering rams. The gang, Hodges realized, had itself grow to be a weapon. When officers received injured or succumbed to exhaustion or pepper spray, they might fall again, different officers stepping ahead to take their place within the fray. As officers round him fell, Hodges pressed to the entrance of the road. The opposite aspect was doing the identical, calling out, “We’d like contemporary patriots up right here.” Not like the police, although, the protesters appeared to have an infinite variety of replacements.
Hodges had labored many protests, significantly in the course of the lengthy summer time of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd. In his expertise, when demonstrations turned violent, the violence itself was the purpose, serving as catharsis and launch. However this crowd had a singular objective—to get contained in the Capitol. Solely a handful of exhausted cops, Hodges amongst them, stood within the breach.
Hodges braced himself towards a metallic door body to his proper. However as quickly as he received located, the momentum shifted. The gang shouted “Heave, ho!” and pushed towards the officers, pinning Hodges towards the door body. He felt the arduous plastic of a police protect that rioters had stolen urgent into his different aspect.
A video—which might quickly be considered by hundreds of thousands of individuals world wide—captured what occurred subsequent. Hodges was trapped, his entire physique getting crushed. His arms hung uselessly at his sides. He successfully couldn’t transfer his legs. A person wrapped his hand round Hodges’s gasoline masks, violently shoving it forwards and backwards after which ripping it off, shouting what seemed like “How do you want me now, fucker?” As Hodges stood there, scared and weak, the person grabbed his baton and bashed him on the top with it, rupturing his lip and smashing his cranium. The video centered on Hodges’s face, his mouth bloody as he struggled to breathe. Fearing that he would quickly collapse and be dragged into the gang, Hodges did the one factor he might—he screamed for assist.
Most cops have hero goals, protector fantasies that maintain them by means of days which might be principally mundane. The video of Hodges crying out plaintively is the antithesis of how a cop needs to be seen. Within the ensuing days and years, Hodges has needed to come to phrases with that helplessness. He’d bravely superior to the entrance of the police line, however in the long run, he’d wanted rescuing. Like so many individuals whose lives have been outlined by seconds of video from that day, Hodges doesn’t just like the story his tells. However he has accepted it, as a result of it’s what occurred. Over time, he has realized to giggle when pals joke about how he received his ass kicked on January 6. However the seriousness of his predicament, how shut he got here to blindness or perhaps loss of life, stays ever close to; he can nonetheless really feel the person’s fingers crawling up his cheek towards his eye.
Somewhat after 4 p.m., Trump lastly submitted to the a number of entreaties from members of Congress, the vp, and plenty of others and recorded a video telling the protesters to go house. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everybody is aware of it, particularly the opposite aspect,” he mentioned. “However it’s a must to go house now. We have now to have peace.” He continued: “There’s by no means been a time like this the place such a factor occurred, the place they may take it away from all of us—from me, from you, from our nation. This was a fraudulent election, however we will’t play into the fingers of those individuals. We have now to have peace. So go house.” Nationwide Guardsmen and different reinforcements lastly started to reach. At 6:01 p.m., Trump tweeted: “These are the issues and occasions that occur when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from nice patriots who’ve been badly & unfairly handled for therefore lengthy. Go house with love & in peace. Bear in mind today without end!”
Although the Capitol had been breached and defiled, and the certification proceedings interrupted, law enforcement officials like Hodges—and Noah Rathbun; and Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who saved lawmakers by redirecting a bunch of marauders away from the Senate chamber; and Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd, who in capturing Ashli Babbitt doubtlessly stopped what would have been a surge of rioters towards the Home chamber, the place members of Congress had been hiding—had held off sufficient of the mob for lengthy sufficient that no legislators had been killed or badly injured. The proceedings might resume, permitting the switch of energy to Joe Biden two weeks later.
Hodges and his fellow CDU 42 officers stayed within the Capitol Crypt till late that night time, sitting cross-legged and leaning towards columns, nursing their wounds. They had been battered and exhausted, however would have fought once more in the event that they needed to, he instructed me.
Within the years that adopted, Hodges testified in court docket at his attackers’ legal trials and sentencing hearings. He believed it was essential that they face penalties. He instructed one decide that he wasn’t a vengeful individual; he simply wished what was truthful. Two of his attackers from the tunnel, Patrick McCaughey III and Steven Cappuccio, had been convicted of a number of felony counts and sentenced to roughly seven years every in jail. The person who dug into his eye, Clifford Mackrell, pleaded responsible to assaulting officers and was sentenced to 27 months.
In November 2024, when Individuals reelected Trump, Hodges felt a deep sense of grief. Throughout 11 years of policing, he’d seen individuals do horrible issues to 1 one other—shootings, stabbings, maimings. However the election outcomes strained his religion in humanity greater than any of that. In spite of everything Trump has finished? Hodges thought. In spite of everything we learn about him? His good friend Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who’d been known as “nigger” for the primary time whereas in uniform on January 6, later mentioned that seeing the 2024 election unfold was like watching the tip of Titanic : You knew what was coming, nevertheless it nonetheless harm to look at. Each Dunn and Hodges way back grew uninterested in speak concerning the “shifting narrative” of January 6. “Ain’t no narrative,” Dunn likes to say. “Play the tape.”
As Hodges labored the inauguration in January 2025, he surveyed the legions of completely satisfied individuals in MAGA hats. The scene befuddled him. “It was simply very baffling to me, how we’d gotten thus far, after every thing we’d been by means of, that individuals noticed match to vote for him once more,” he mentioned. The assembled Trump supporters, none of whom appeared to acknowledge Hodges, might not have been occupied with the chaos of January 6, 2021, however he was. He thinks about it each day. His bodily accidents have healed, however his psychic ones haven’t; he has PTSD signs and has been recognized with despair. When Hodges returned house from the inauguration that night time and browse concerning the pardons, he wasn’t shocked. He tried to wrap his thoughts across the thought of one other 4 years of Trump, and across the incongruity of a so-called law-and-order president, hours into his second time period, pardoning individuals who had attacked cops with weapons that included knives, Tasers, bear spray, pepper spray, lumber, bicycle racks, a cattle prod, a sledgehammer, a ladder, a flagpole, a baseball bat, a hockey stick, and a hearth extinguisher.
Prime: MPD Officer Daniel Hodges is pinned towards a door body by a riot protect wielded by Trump supporters.
Backside: Hodges exterior the Capitol, November 2025.
How might this occur in a democracy, propelled by the leaders of a political celebration that professed to “again the blue”? It was even more durable to know how so many law enforcement officials nonetheless supported Trump. The Fraternal Order of Police, the occupation’s largest union, had endorsed him for a 3rd time in 2024. Definitely there was blame to go round, Hodges believed. He put a few of that on Democrats, who’d all however deserted police after Floyd’s killing.
Nonetheless, Hodges hoped that there can be some nuance in who obtained pardons. There was not. Trump didn’t weigh every case like Solomon: He issued full pardons to nearly all the 1,600 individuals charged in reference to the rebellion. Of these, about 600 had been charged with resisting arrest or assaulting officers, 175 of them with harmful or lethal weapons. Irrespective of how massive their sin, it doesn’t matter what all of these judges and juries had determined, nearly everybody was simply—poof—forgiven. The one (partial) exceptions had been the 14 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys whose sentences Trump commuted, which means they had been launched from jail however their convictions weren’t erased.
After the federal government spent tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on what the Division of Justice mentioned was one of many largest and most advanced investigations within the nation’s historical past, Trump erased all of it at a stroke. Roughly 1,000 individuals had accepted culpability and pleaded responsible. “No,” Trump’s pardons declared, “you’re not responsible.” One other 250 individuals had taken their circumstances to trial. Solely 4 had been acquitted of all fees, in keeping with NPR; the remainder had been discovered responsible by decide or jury on no less than some counts. Practically 500 defendants awaited trials or sentencing in 2025. “Anybody who spent any time engaged on Jan. 6 circumstances noticed how violent a day that was,” Mike Romano, a former U.S. lawyer who prosecuted a few of these circumstances, instructed The New York Instances not too long ago. “It’s extremely demoralizing to see one thing you labored on for 4 years wiped away by a lie—I imply the concept that prosecution of the rioters was a grave nationwide injustice. We had sturdy proof towards each individual we prosecuted.”
Hodges has watched because the January 6 defendants have been not merely forgiven however extolled, telling their persecution tales at Republican fundraisers as donors snack on meatball platters and charcuterie boards. Generally he can’t consider the lengths to which Trump will go to rewrite the historical past of that day: It was not an rebellion, however a “day of affection.” The J6ers weren’t insurrectionists, traitors, and miscreants however patriots, heroes, and innocents. Hodges worries about the truth that Trump has ordered the Smithsonian to evaluate all of its displays with a view to “restore reality and sanity.” (One former Capitol Police officer instructed me that he’d donated the boots he’d worn on January 6 to the Smithsonian, hoping they’d be included in a future exhibit—now he fears they’ll be tossed.)
Although different cops generally accuse them of grandstanding, of looking for cash or fame, Hodges and Dunn and some others have continued to discuss what occurred to them on January 6, as a result of they consider it’s essential to stop historical past from being rewritten. “If individuals would simply admit what occurred that day, we wouldn’t should maintain telling our tales,” Hodges mentioned. However the efforts of Trump and others to falsify the story, he added, have saved him “tragically related.” (Exterior of court docket, many cops haven’t spoken publicly about their experiences on January 6, together with Rathbun.) Hodges says this shouldn’t be a partisan concern. He would have defended Trump if he had been attacked at his second inauguration—simply as, he says, he would defend the Capitol towards an assault by a Democratic mob. “The second a Democratic president tries to carry on to energy illegally, I’ll go after them arduous,” he instructed me. “Till such a time, there’s just one one that’s finished that.”
Just lately, I instructed Hodges that I’d been interviewing Tom Webster about January 6. Hodges vaguely remembered the story concerning the former NYPD cop who’d assaulted certainly one of his colleagues. After I instructed him that Webster nonetheless believed that the 2020 election might have been stolen, Hodges was not shocked. He doesn’t suppose individuals like Webster will cease mendacity to themselves anytime quickly. “They will’t,” Hodges mentioned; the cognitive dissonance and ethical ache can be too nice.
Accepting actuality would imply reevaluating every thing they thought they knew—that their actions had been moral and justified, that they’re nice patriots. Accepting the reality of January 6 would require coming to grips with the truth that they supported a con man and took part in a violent plot to subvert democracy. The rapid reward for endeavor this sort of arduous self-examination would primarily be disgrace and remorse.
“To grapple with these truths would, in a really possible way, unmake them,” Hodges mentioned.
After Thomas Webster was launched from jail on January 20, 2025, having served a bit of greater than two years of his 10-year sentence, he went house to a home he’d by no means seen and a bunch of individuals he’d by no means met. His spouse, Michelle, had moved to Mississippi, the place members of a church and a J6 assist group had adopted her. They introduced dinner and a cake to have fun Webster’s return.
He fearful that he’d wrestle to readjust, however he shortly felt at house. He and Michelle, married for 25 years, had some bumps as they handled the harm from that day—social, monetary, logistical—however he instructed me they’ve gotten previous these. Webster mourns all that he missed—educating his youngest son the way to drive, transferring his center baby into her faculty dorm, watching his oldest daughter graduate from boot camp. Interactions together with his spouse’s household stay strained; to today, nobody has instructed 99-year-old Nana that Webster was in jail.
Webster and his spouse purchased a one-story ranch home, 20 acres in the course of nowhere. He likes residing in Mississippi, the place he feels farther from the attain of presidency and politics. Not way back, when his daughter known as him for assist with a flat tire and he was capable of drive out to her with a patch package, he felt grateful to Trump for the pardon that allowed him to try this.
Webster in his storage in Mississippi, November 2025. He says he barely acknowledges the model of himself who drove to Washington 5 years in the past. However he nonetheless believes that the 2020 election might have been stolen.
Over time, Webster has opened up, telling the individuals he’s gotten to know on the Toccopola Grocery, an outdated nation retailer with checkered red-and-white tablecloths and classic Coca-Cola indicators, what he’s been by means of. He despatched them a video about his case, one of many few that he thought rendered his story precisely—that he’d gone to petition his authorities peacefully and had been assaulted by an aggressive cop. Webster can’t decide in the event that they consider him or not however, in contrast to some of us again in New York, they appear open-minded. “Ain’t our place to guage,” they are saying to him.
Webster stays pissed off that the complete story of January 6, in his view, has but to be instructed. Trump freed him and his fellow patriots from bodily jail, Webster instructed me, “however we’re not really free till individuals know the reality.”
After I requested Webster what the reality is, he mentioned he believes that the 2020 election was most likely stolen. (A couple of third of Individuals share this perception, despite the fact that no credible proof has ever emerged to assist the declare, and dozens of courts have rejected it.) He believes that the federal authorities made an organized effort to entrap Trump’s largest supporters on January 6. And he believes that, in pursuing the J6 defendants so mercilessly, the federal government tried to silence them, by terrifying them and different conservatives throughout the nation.
Webster has filed a petition to the court docket asking that it vacate his conviction, arguing that essential information weren’t recognized throughout his trial that might have led to him being discovered not responsible. Regardless that he’s now been pardoned, Webster instructed me he felt it was essential to doc his complete story for the report, preserving it for future generations to contemplate throughout “extra steady occasions.”
I identified to Webster that he had apologized to Officer Rathbun in court docket. Wasn’t {that a} concession that he’d acted wrongly on January 6? In response, Webster mentioned that, though he feels “dangerous about how the entire day went down,” his apology shouldn’t be taken as an request for forgiveness: “I used to be pressured by my lawyer to apologize. He mentioned it will assist me scale back my sentence.”
Webster is upset by the place issues stand now: With Trump in workplace and MAGA conservatives in energy, they lastly have the flexibility to show what occurred that day—so why aren’t they? When Dan Bongino was a podcaster, he repeatedly asserted that undercover brokers embedded within the crowd had helped orchestrate January 6; now that Trump has made him deputy director of the FBI, why isn’t Bongino releasing the proof? Webster feels equally upset in FBI Director Kash Patel and Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi. “Why are you guys at all times bragging about arresting unlawful Mexicans doing roof work?” he requested. He wonders why they’re not as a substitute exposing the plots of the deep state, as Trump has demanded. Webster believes that Bongino and Patel have grow to be polluted by the identical swamp that Trump has repeatedly vowed to wash up.
Webster says he barely acknowledges the model of himself who drove to D.C. 5 years in the past. Who was that man full of a lot bravado that he thought he might save the nation? His days of charging into the fray are over, he mentioned. Generally he feels responsible concerning the life he has now. So lots of the J6 defendants have been divorced by their wives, disowned by their youngsters, fired from their jobs. By Webster’s depend, no less than 5 have died by suicide. But he nonetheless views Trump as the perfect hope for cleansing out the deep state. “He’s the one individual I nonetheless sort of consider in,” Webster mentioned.
Just lately, he was requested to talk at an occasion with different J6 defendants. He’d felt advantageous as he’d approached the rostrum, stuffed with ideas to share. However as he stood onstage, he was overcome with emotion. Scenes from that day flashed by means of his thoughts: the cop with the gasoline masks. The texture of the flagpole in his hand. Their tug-of-war. His personal rage.
As Webster appeared out on the members of the gang, he thought they’d most likely Google him after they received house. Which video clip would they discover? he questioned—wouldn’t it inform the fitting story or the flawed one? Would they see him as a felon or a patriot? Which reality would they consider?
On his means house, Webster instructed his spouse that he wouldn’t converse at any extra occasions. Reliving what they’d been by means of was too painful. And he didn’t see a lot level till the entire story was revealed. So he waits for the reality to solidify into one thing agency sufficient to face on, a day he fears might by no means come.
This text seems within the February 2026 print version with the headline “Is This What Patriotism Appears to be like Like?”
