Five Years Later: Democracy After the January 6 Capitol Attack

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. We hope that everyone had a great holiday break and we’re really excited to be back with you for season two. This is our first episode of season two. I’m Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I’m now a senior fellow at the Ash Center. And for season two, we’re going to try something a little different. And it’s something that we experimented with in season one, and we thought it worked well. But each week we’re going to select either a book or a long-form article, and we’re going to bring in somebody who can discuss it, discuss that piece — often the author — and say why it’s especially relevant or how it bears on events that are unfolding today.

And the fun part about this is we’ll introduce you to a lot of this great literature, and we’ll also introduce you to a lot of these great writers. And so if you have questions for the writers, this is an opportunity to pose those questions to the authors themselves, which isn’t something that we always get to encounter.

Additionally, if you have any ideas of stuff that we should be reading — and we’re not talking just sort of like your 700-word newspaper article, but something a little longer, a little heftier, maybe even tapping into academic work a little bit, given that we’re at a university — then please feel free to recommend that to us and we’ll give it a look.

Fung: Right. And so our hope is that this will be a little bit of a democracy book and article club in season two, and we’ll see how that works out.

As always, we’re speaking as individuals and not on behalf of Harvard University, the Kennedy School, or the Ash Center.

Richer: Yep. So just go ahead and put your comments in the chat box, and we’ll be monitoring those and integrating them into our conversation today.

Fung: Great. So, we are less than two weeks into 2026. I thought things were going to be mellowing out and getting quiet on the news and politics scene and we’d be able to read and talk about academic articles. But they are definitely not slowing down.

The United States military initiated the new year by invading Venezuela with U.S. Delta Force commandos, capturing, arresting, kidnapping — depending on your point of view — President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. That’s one thing that happened.

In mid-December of 2025, Congress’s deadline for the administration to release all of the Epstein files came and went, with a very small percentage of those files being released. And we’ll see what happens in the weeks ahead.

And of course, Minneapolis resident Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer on January 7th. For those of you keeping count, her death was the first gun homicide event of the year in Minneapolis. Since then, one more person has been killed unrelated to ICE on January 8th. But so, half of the deaths due to guns so far in Minneapolis were Renee Good so far in Minneapolis.

Just hours after the shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said that Good’s killing was justified because she was trying to run over an officer and that she was engaged in an act of domestic terrorism. President Trump posted on Truth Social that Renee Good “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” On the other hand, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said that the DHS statement was bull** and penned a New York Times opinion piece titled “Trump Is Lying to You.” Video analysis by The New York Times and The Washington Post concludes that the ICE officer shot once through the windshield and then twice through the driver’s-side window at point-blank range and refuted, somewhat, the administration’s account.

Now, these vastly different accounts of what happened in Minneapolis mirror the subject of today’s discussion. Last week was also the fifth anniversary of the protests and the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As with Good’s death in Minnesota, there’s dramatic disagreement about what happened. Was it an insurrection and a riot, or a justified, largely peaceful protest against a stolen election?

If we could show the graphic, I captured a screenshot from the White House’s webpage marking January 6th. And the White House says: “With his triumphant return to the White House, President Trump wasted no time righting one of the darkest wrongs in modern American history. On Inauguration Day 2025, he issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the vast majority of January 6th defendants, who are patriotic citizens who had been viciously overcharged, denied due process, and held as political hostages by a vengeful regime.”

On today’s show, we look back upon that day in a conversation with Mary Clare Jalonick, who has just released a great book, Storm at the Capitol, which is an oral history — hour by hour, almost minute by minute — of that day.

Richer: And so we’ll now welcome in Mary Clare, who is a longtime reporter at the Associated Press. She is a graduate of Davidson College and previously was a reporter for Congressional Quarterly. And we’re really excited to have her.

She just published this book seven days ago, on the five-year anniversary of January 6, 2021. And Archon and I both had the chance to read it this past week. It was not necessarily an uplifting read, but a very meaningful read and one that I think contributes significantly to the conversation that continues on. So welcome to the show.

Mary Clare Jalonick: Thanks for having me. Thanks so much.

Richer: So Archon and I wanted to start with: why did you decide to write this book? A lot has been written in terms of reporting. A lot has been litigated in terms of documents. Obviously, quite a few people have been prosecuted. And so this story has been told in other fashions. Why did you feel the need to write this book?

Jalonick: Well, two reasons, mostly. I mean, I was there on January 6th in the Capitol. I cover Congress for the Associated Press, where I’ve worked for 20 years, and I’ve covered Congress for that entire time, off and on. And the last 12 years, I’ve been there every day.

And so I had been covering January 6th, and I had a lot of this sort of, as we call it — in my notebook — I talked to a lot of people about their experiences that day when I covered the January 6th select committee that investigated it. And I talked to a lot of people, and whenever I was talking to anyone, either about January 6th or often not about January 6th, I would try to ask about their experiences. This is the lawmakers that I was talking about.

I ended up writing a few different stories for the first anniversary, and I had a lot of good material — long-form quotes about how people felt and what they saw. And it seemed especially relevant once we got a couple of years on, and it was obvious that there were a lot of people who were sort of trying to create a different narrative about what happened that went counter to the facts.

And it seemed to me that an oral history is a really good way to present those facts without it being a narrative from someone that people might not trust. It’s not my narrative. It’s not any politician’s narrative. The idea is to be definitive and nonpartisan and to present a collective history. There’s more than 150 voices in the book. While people have different perspectives and remember different details at times, there’s really not a lot of diversity in terms of the facts of what happened, which is that a large group of rioters — hundreds, thousands of rioters (not hundreds of thousands but hundreds of rioters, thousands of people) — were at the Capitol and broke into windows and doors, and temporarily stopped the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.

And you’ll see there are rioters included in the book. The voices include lawmakers, police, rioters themselves, workers, journalists, and staff. And everyone kind of has the same general narrative, including the rioters, of what happened. Their motivations and feelings in the moment may differ, but there’s not a lot of contradiction in terms of the basic facts of the day.

Richer: So can I pause you there? Because I haven’t read maybe any books like this, which is not your narrative, not a paragraph-by-paragraph recitation of events of that day but is instead clips of quotes and recollections from an array of people involved that day. Why did you decide to — because I’m sure you could have turned it into prose; you write several hundred words every single day I’m sure — why did you decide to leave it as their interviews, their quotes?

Jalonick: I thought their quotes standing on their own were really powerful in a lot of ways. And there’s also one thing that — around half of the interviews are mine, like my personal interviews that I did with people. But a lot of the book is from court documents, from court testimony, like rioters in rioters’ trials, either testifying in their own trials, a lot of police testified in those trials. There were a lot of people that I couldn’t get to in those testimonies. There were Secret Service testimonies, things like that. And there was just a lot of really good detail. There were hundreds of pages in every trial that I looked into where you could use some of that testimony.

So, there were just so many powerful passages from a lot of people. And I think just letting that stand on its own is better than my trying to reconstruct a narrative, which would be sort of inherently my narrative.

So, I really like oral histories. I’ve always liked them. And I think it was just an interesting way to get all of those people in there and just kind of letting that stand on its own.

Fung: Some of the oral histories or interviews in sociology books that I read are really trying to get at how people have deep views about a situation and how they’re making meaning out of it.

And your book, you choose to stay kind of at almost — not quite, but largely at a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of level. It’s like what happened at 2:00 p.m. on January 6th.

And so how did you think about that tradeoff, telling people just what happened, just the facts and how they played out, versus kind of interviewing people and asking, you know, what does this say about American democracy and kind of getting deep on their perspectives on those kinds of questions?

Jalonick: And I got a little bit into that at the end, but I think mostly it was sort of letting people know exactly what happened in the building that day. That was sort of the main — there’s been all these investigations into what happened at the White House. What was Trump doing? What were his motivations? What do you call this? Did he incite it? All of that. And I guess the idea is that people can sort of decide that themselves by looking at this set of facts. But yes, I mean, we definitely tried to — I think there were some cases even where my editor was like, no, this is too much, where I would sort of try to infuse some emotion in the narrative. That didn’t happen in many cases, but there were a few cases where she even said to me, “I think we need to pare it back even more.”

And I agree, just because the narrative part of it is really supposed to just sort of get you and explain what’s happening. And then I do think there’s a lot of emotion and power in a lot of those quotes and it’s sort of what people are feeling and thinking in the moment. And it was less about just sort of those overall themes, although some of that is in there, but a lot of it was sort of what they were experiencing in that moment and what they might have been thinking.

Fung: So getting to some of the particular passages — obviously, it was a crazy day in so many ways. But you draw out how some people are really quite surprised as it’s unfolding. And so on different sides of the spectrum, there is Jamie Raskin, who’s thinking, “Oh, are we going to count the votes properly and allocate them?” And his big worry is that Mike Pence is going to mess up the count process.

And so he says, “I felt great relief” when he realized that Pence was not going to mess up the process. And then he says, “History plays tricks on everybody. I’ve been so worried about Vice President Mike Pence. And in fact, I should have been worried about the people who wanted to hang Mike Pence,” which is like, wow.

And then on the other side, Marjorie Taylor Greene during the day says, quote, “We thought Antifa was breaking in or Black Lives Matter because those were the riots that had gone on all through 2020” in her mind, day in and day out, just horrible riots all over the country. “And that was the only thing that made sense to most of us.” And then somebody says, “Marjorie, it’s our people. It’s not Antifa.”

What are some of the other kind of surprising moments to the particular people that the world is not what they think it is, or the day is just not what they think it is?

Jalonick: Yeah, I mean, it was definitely — and Jamie Raskin has such a great way with word — yeah, I mean, everyone was absolutely shocked. I think one of my favorite quotes in the book is I interviewed Nancy Pelosi, and she said, it’s a very simple quote. She said, “We expected mischief in terms of process. We never expected violence.” And I think that is very much where everybody’s head was in that moment. I mean, I think people probably forget that we had no idea what Mike Pence was going to do. He was not giving any clues beforehand. We sort of now remember what he did, which was decline to try and help Donald Trump overturn the election. But he was speaking at rallies in the day beforehand and giving hints that he thought the election might have been stolen. We really — it was a total cliffhanger basically coming in.

And he had decided — now we know through investigations — that he had decided quite a bit before that he was not going to do that. He didn’t say it. And Trump was calling him and pressuring him as soon as that morning.

So we knew going in that there was going to be this sort of dramatic standoff, and it was possible that Pence was going to try something. So that 1:00 moment, when he released that letter saying that he did not believe this is what the founders intended, right at 1:00, which is when the session started, so, that was a question I asked a lot of lawmakers who were there. Were you surprised? Were you relieved? What was your feeling when you got that letter and found out that Pence wouldn’t do it? And that was what I asked Raskin when he said that.

So yeah, there really was just this sense that something like that could never happen. I mean, no one ever envisioned that, including the police, which led to a lot of security failures that day.

And I’ve talked to some people since who were maybe out in the states or who were Trump supporters or whatever, who might say, how could you guys not know? People were really mad. And I thought that was interesting. But certainly in our bubble, that was just not — the imagination didn’t really go there. I think people thought that there would be a lot of people outside and that it could get violent outside, but not that they would break in.

Fung: Nobody — not the reporters, not the staff, not the police, not the members

Jalonick: I mean, maybe somebody, but not many.

Richer: That tees up a lot of important questions, including, I think, why did you not know? Because a lot of the allegations after the fact were that this was mismanaged by Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, whomever.

But before we jump to that, Mike Pence happens to be someone I hold in very high regard. But assessing that, do you think that if he had declared where he was going three days before January 6th, that the events of January 6th would have looked differently?

Jalonick: That’s so interesting. I haven’t thought about that. Maybe. I mean, I think that he would have come under a lot of fire, obviously — criticism — if he had done that. But yeah, maybe. I’m not sure. I mean, it really was kind of — it was obviously, some groups were planning on this. But in some ways it was spontaneous by others, that sort of mob mentality that came together. And I don’t know. I don’t think we can know that, right? I mean, there were so many factors that went into it.

Fung: Right. It might have been worse. Or do you think it would have been better?

Richer: But part of the day was intended to be the gathering at the Ellipse, in which the president assembled many thousands of his supporters, it was meant to be inducive — Mike Pence, right, that he needs to do this, and that his people, our people, the people that voted for the ticket, which included him, wanted to see this happen. And so I don’t know if it would have been less exciting if it would have been a foregone conclusion, or if that would have said, “Hey, we know what the stakes are now. The stakes are if we don’t act, then Pence isn’t going to do this on his own, and we’re going to have a presidency that we find repulsive.”

So I don’t know. But that was just something. I, looking back on it, haven’t reflected much on the last-minute-ness of the letter that he wrote. It was very telling to me when he’s in the car with his legal counsel, Greg Jacob, and they’re still putting that together as they’re driving to the Capitol.

Jalonick: Pretty wild.

Richer: I want to remind our viewers that if you put your question in the comments, I’m always reviewing the comments, so feel free to chime in here.

So, turning to that other thing that I mentioned: did somebody fail on January 6th? I mean, the day didn’t go how it should have happened. And I guess I would have operated under the presumption that, like, you can’t get in the Capitol. You’ve got to be crazy. That’s got to be one of the most guarded places in the universe.

Jalonick: Right.

Fung: Nobody has for a hundred years, right?

Richer: And was that the result of a failure or just a lack of imagination?

Jalonick: I think both. Yeah. I mean, the top security officials were not taking seriously the threat. And part of that was because of a lack of intelligence — a good intelligence — which wasn’t hard. I mean, the people were planning it openly online. So, the intelligence failure was particularly bad. And that’s something they’ve spent the last five years trying to improve. They really have reformed the intelligence operations and everything else in Capitol Police in the last five years.

But yes, it was definitely a failure of a lot of people, and certainly a security failure in terms of the police not getting good instructions about what to do. It was almost just, as in the book, the radio was total chaos. There really weren’t many directions being given by the higher-ups. So officers were just running around and trying to figure out where they could be most helpful, visually, basically. MPD, DC police, were there as well. They really saved the day in a lot of ways.

But it was too bad because I think there was a lot of demonization of the individual Capitol Police officers immediately afterward. I know personally, right afterward, I felt so frustrated that that  had happened. But I think now, with time, we’ve realized they didn’t have the direction or the resources. They were fighting so hard, and so many of them were injured. They really are the victims here in a lot of ways.

Richer: Is there a single point of failure? Is there a person who failed on this day?

Jalonick: I don’t think there is. That’s what I would say. I mean, just from the investigations, there were so many multiple failures. There weren’t enough people there. There wasn’t good intelligence. The equipment they had was not great. There were shields breaking on impact. They weren’t trained for this kind of thing.

There are so many different ways that there were failures. I don’t think you can blame one person for sure on any of it. And there are a lot of people who try to point it on Pelosi — that’s one of the Republican talking points, it’s Pelosi’s fault. But what always gets lost there is that Mitch McConnell was the leader of the Senate. He had equal supervision as Pelosi. And they hire and fire the sergeants at arms. That’s where that comes in, because the sergeants at arms who were making those decisions in the days before do work for them. But Pelosi said she didn’t have any input in the decision not to bring in the National Guard beforehand.

But as soon as the fighting began and they were asking the chief of police, Steven Sund, was begging all day for the National Guard, and Pelosi authorized it. McConnell authorized it. There were later sort of inexplicable delays at the Pentagon, and that’s something that all sides agree on, that that happened. There were so many different facets to this. It’s not something that can be explained away with one talking point.

Fung: Was the Pentagon delay just kind of bureaucratic? They have to ask five people down the line and so on?

Jalonick: There’s been a lot of investigation into that and exactly what happened. I think it was somewhat chaos, but it’s unclear if there were any reasons for the delay or if anyone was specifically delaying it. That’s still unclear and has been a subject of both the Democratic and Republican investigations.

Richer: I want to get up to today eventually.

Fung: I’m kind of going back. I mean, we’ve all watched videos of the day and read a lot about it. But reading your book, especially the account in the mid-afternoon, is I don’t think I appreciated the sheer violence of what was happening. The interview accounts, the oral history — I’m an action film fan — it reads like a scene from 300, the account of the Battle of Thermopylae, when there’s 300 Spartans defending against these thousands of Persians.

And so one detective says, quote, “The hallway is approximately 10 feet wide, officers shoulder to shoulder lined up by rows.” And then the demonstrators are also lining up by rows, trying to push in, and they’re trying to push back. And then a Metro PD officer in the same part of the hallway, reporting on that, says, “They were extremely physical. I don’t think anyone was talking at that point. It was just physical — people hitting each other, punching people with poles and metal poles.” And that was just amazing to me.

And, I guess by way of opening this part of the discussion, so these are a bunch of people who have a lot of experience policing many, many, many protests, some of which inevitably get out of hand. Does this feel like in all your conversations with them fundamentally different and more violent? And why? And why is it different from the many, many other protests that these people are professionals in controlling?

Jalonick: Yeah, it’s so different. It’s like this hand-to-hand combat with this huge crowd. And you know, you’re talking about action movies, and one of the other officers says in the book, “I looked out and it looked like a scene from The Lord of the Rings, one of those huge battles in The Lord of the Rings.” And we had to go back and forth a little bit because he named this specific battle, and I was like, “I’m not sure which battle it is.” But you all might know.

But it really made sense to me, because it does look like that. They weren’t trained really for this hand-to-hand combat. They might be trained for scuffles, and sort of think about in the streets, like what we saw the summer before, some of the stuff that was going on, but not this.

And you say it reads like an action movie. That just unfolded I didn’t try to make it read like an action movie. I didn’t manipulate it in any way, but it just sort of reads like that because it was so dramatic. And to me, that part of the day was kind of the climax of the book because it really was this sort of epic battle in this really iconic place, which is the tunnel on the front of the Capitol in the middle of the west front of the Capitol, facing the mall. And it’s where the president walks out onto the inaugural stage. So right behind the tunnel where everyone was kind of trying to push in is the inaugural stage.

That’s where the president walks out onto the inaugural stage. Right behind the tunnel, where everyone was pushing in, is the inaugural stage. So if you think about where any president who is being inaugurated outside is standing, that’s where this crowd was. It was just so wild. Joe Biden was supposed to be walking out that door two weeks later, and he did. But the fact that all of this violence and, you know, happened right there is just — it’s really hard to think.

And this one officer, Daniel Hodges, was, you know, crushed in the doors, and those are the big golden doors on the very front of the Capitol. And lastly, I’ll just say that it’s interesting that you say you didn’t appreciate the violence because that’s been a surprise to me after the book has come out how many people have said that to me. People like you all, who are super plugged in and watch the news all the time and understand. I had a fellow reporter at the Capitol who wasn’t there at the time, who wasn’t there yet, said that to me the other day. I think a lot of people don’t realize how violent it was. And some of that is because we don’t talk about it that much. It’s sort of a controversial subject right now.

Fung: After reading it, I understand the PTSD and the number of suicides that followed a lot more clearly.

Richer: Was it four or five?

Jalonick: There were four officers who died by suicide afterward. Two of them were the next summer. So, obviously we don’t know exactly but MPD did announce that these two officers had died by suicide and that they had been there, but that’s all we know. But one of them was the day after and another one was in the week after. Which is just so awful and tragic that that happened. It’s hard to read and to write about.

Fung: The battle reference was probably Helm’s Deep, when everyone’s mashed together.

Jalonick: I think that’s right. I was worried people wouldn’t know.

Richer: As Sean was referencing in the comments, weren’t there two January 6’s? There’s the January 6 where a police officer is getting hit over the head with a pole, but then there’s the January 6 where, as you noted in your book, one rioter even felt a little bit sheepish about asking somebody, “Where’s the bathroom?” So, it possible that somebody participated in that day, in that riot, and had a completely different experience from some of the ones that were being shown on television?

Jalonick: For sure. I mean, I think that’s something that I learned in this and sort of came to understand is there’s a real diversity of motivations of the rioters. There were the extremist groups who had, like, weapons stockpiled in Virginia and ready for a civil war, and were sort of tactically trying to get into the building, knew where the entrances were, that kind of thing.

And then there were people who just kind of came along for the ride, either because they were angry and had been riled up or just because they just wanted to see what was going to happen.

I don’t know how many, I can’t tell you how many of each, but I think the rioter you’re referencing is an interview I did with Jason Riddle, who actually tried to reject his pardon earlier this year. And that’s something that you can actually do. But he said, you know, he told a story and just said, “It was a party. It was like a party to me. It was like euphoria I felt inside there.” He was in the Senate parliamentarian’s office, which was being ransacked. He took a bottle of wine and just started drinking it. And he also took a book called Senate Procedure out of the parliamentarian’s office and sold it to someone when he first got out of the building after that.

And the person told him they’d just seen someone carried out of the building who had been shot.  And I assume that was Ashley Babbitt, who was shot when she was trying to get into the House with members still inside. And he said, “No, no, no. It’s like a party in there.” And they said, “No, I saw this.” And he said he was never the same again because he realized he could be in a whole lot of trouble for what he was doing. So, he just ran.

And I thought that was like a really interesting, you know, there were just a lot of different types of people there. And it was just sort of that mob mentality that they all kind of came into one.

Richer: Is that dichotomy the basis of the dispute today? Because if you go online, there will be plenty of people — and I wrote an article about the commemoration of January 6 — and you’ll see plenty of people who say, “No big deal. Just not that violent,” you know, lots of different theories about what provoked it, but also just sort of a sense that — in fact, Erick Erickson, a popular radio show host, basically said, “We can’t expect Americans to think about school shootings for more than one day. Why are we surprised that not that many people care about January 6, five years from now?”

Now, I don’t know if that’s an accurate characterization, but it is a characterization of what some people feel at least about this day. Why is that?

Jalonick: Yeah, I don’t know why exactly that is. But I do think that’s probably the stories that you hear from some — you’re not hearing as much from people who do want to downplay it about the violence and the injuries to the officers. You’re hearing more about sort of the innocent people who walked through.

There’s a quote that I have in a section near the end of the book, where I sort of list some of what people are saying today, some of the people who are downplaying it. And there was a tweet or a post on X a year ago on January 6, 2025, from a congressman named Mike Collins, who just sort of laid out this narrative that, you know, hundreds of peaceful grandmothers came into the Capitol and walked around on an albeit unauthorized visit. And that is a narrative that I think some people believe.

And as you mentioned in the beginning, this White House website, I actually thought was pretty interesting because it actually laid out — I don’t always understand everything that people are saying or how it connects — but I guess that’s what the narrative is from beginning to end. They sort of lay out the entire day in their narrative. And the narrative that they have is that people peacefully walked there and then got attacked by the police officers, which I think you can see in my book and certainly through all those videos that evidence contradicts that.

But I do think we can believe a lot. People believe what they want to believe. And we don’t see those videos of the violence every day on television or anywhere else. There’s a lot of other stuff going on. As you said, we forget about things within a day sometimes. So, yeah, I think that people just sort of believe what they want to believe a lot of times in politics right now on every subject.

Richer: Yeah. I guess I would just follow up with that. The academic world has maybe reconsidered how it does history. And one of the questions was, why did you choose to do it in an oral history manner? I guess, do you give any credence to the idea that there are multiple truths about this day or that we can tell a definitive history?

Jalonick: I mean, I think there’s a set of facts of what happened that you can’t change, right? I mean, there was violence. The police officers were attacked. They stopped the count, the electoral count. The election was not stolen. It was certified by 50 states, bipartisan officials. There were dozens of lawsuits that were either rejected or dismissed. William Barr was Trump’s attorney general. He said there was not enough evidence of fraud. Those are things that are true, right?

But when you’re talking about people’s individual experiences, sure. And I think that’s a lot of the reason for something like this is it’s not just for one side to understand what happened. It’s for all sides to understand what happened and see that nuance and see that there were different types of people there and different experiences and that they were human beings inside and outside the building and all parts of it.

So I think people’s individual truths, sure. I mean, I do think there are so many different motivations and types of people there.

Fung: Yeah. So, is there a world in which the members could have come out with more solidarity and agreement about what that day was about and how to respond to it? Because in the moment, there are these passages where there’s a lot of solidarity between Republicans and Democrats in Congress and in particular when they all band together and say we got to save the boxes of the electoral vote so that we can count them later and then when they all stay and say no we’ve got to finish the process that day; it’s super important, and they all do that. And then they’re all also just intertwined with these kind of moments of division. When Jim Jordan, who is one of Trump’s strongest allies in Congress, says — he’s trying to help, right? — he says to Liz Cheney, you know, “Let’s get the ladies out of here.” And Liz Cheney says, you know, “Get the F away from me. You did this.” And so there are definitely moments of antipathy as well.

Could they have kind of come out of it agreeing, like, it was really bad that people invaded the Capitol and we need some more solidarity going out of this or no, that was never in the cards?

Jalonick: I mean, it is complicated, right? Yes, there’s still divisions. It created even worse divisions. But at the same time, if you ask, and I think you see this throughout the book, I was certainly pleasantly surprised that there were a lot of Republicans who did want to talk to me. I think if you go up in the hallways, a lot of Republicans still today, they’re going to talk about how bad it was. They might not blame Trump explicitly. Some of them might. I mean, I think you still see some of that complicated reality even in the last week in the Senate. You see this plaque that has been created. It was in 2022. It was supposed to be put up on the West Front to honor the police officers for their fighting. But the Republican House has not done so and has been pressured about it for the last few years.

And finally, last week, Speaker Johnson said, well, it’s not really implementable because of the names on, you know, too many names and all this. And so the Senate actually last week passed with no objections, voice voted. So if one Republican had objected, they couldn’t have done this. And they did. No one objected. And the Senate passed a resolution saying that they’re going to put it up somewhere in the Senate. So, you do still see there is still some agreement on it. Even Trump’s staunchest defenders didn’t object to that. So, you know, it is a complicated reality and sometimes it just depends on the day, honestly.

But, you know, I think one of my favorite quotes in the book is by a CNN reporter, Manu Raju, and he talks about how we’re still figuring out a lot of the details of the day and still trying to understand it. And I really think that that’s true. I think we’re still reckoning with it and lawmakers are certainly still reckoning with it, which means the American public is still trying to figure out exactly what happened in a lot of ways.

Richer: How did it make you feel, Archon?

Fung: I mean, it made me appreciate the day in a different way. And then especially on the heels of the Minneapolis shooting, it makes me think — I don’t know. I mean, despite your best efforts and the clarity and the careful thousands of hours of research, I just don’t see how we’re going to come to a shared account of what happened five years ago in the Capitol or what happened last week in Minneapolis.

I just don’t know. Maybe just more time has to pass, but that’s how it left me feeling.

Here’s your book, which lays out, you know, in exquisite detail what happened, almost minute by minute. And we’re just not going to agree. Not for a while. What do you think?

Richer: I mean, that’s got to be alarming to you, Mary Clare, that even for something as televised and documented as this was — I mean, in Minnesota you had a few body cams. This you had, like, thousands of people, many of whom were reporters, lots of TV cameras. And yet the truth is not 100% on the internet. I’ll just say that much.

So does writing this and seeing some of the responses, does it exasperate you as a journalist and say, like, what is the reason of this whole endeavor if we can’t agree on facts anymore?

Fung: And did you think about new angles to try to create more agreement?

Jalonick: I mean, I think — well, two things. Like, as a congressional reporter, we’re kind of used to that. That’s something that happens a lot. It’s not just this.

But, I guess, one of my colleagues says sometimes, you know, we just write through it, right? Like we just sort of — it’s kind of hard, but it’s also easy. And what we do, especially at AP, we’re very much down the line, you know, just sort of get the facts out there and write the truth. And that’s what I can do in my role, right?

Different people have different roles, but that’s sort of how I feel that I can help, which is just sort of get the truth out there. And that’s not always an easy truth for everyone. The truth isn’t always going to make one side or the other happy. But I think that just laying out on paper what we know and what other people say we know, not just based on what I think I know, that’s what I can do to try to help with that.

But yeah, you’re never going to solve that problem. I mean, we’re in such a partisan moment. It’s not just this subject. We’re covering a million things every day on the Hill, and all of them have some sort of sharp partisan disagreement.

Well, not all of them. Every once in a while there’s something that everyone will agree on, and that’s always kind of fun to cover when everybody can come together. I really like when we can see bipartisanship.

Richer: The book is only about 300 pages, and it reads quickly because it’s not just blocks of text. It’s little captures of individual stories, weaving them all together. But I will say I put it down a lot because I was angry. I was angry that this is something that we’re disputing. I was angry that this wasn’t universally acknowledged as a wrong.

I’m a romantic about American democracy, and so I sort of see this as our sacred citadel. And for me, this was never analogous with some of the riots that happened vis-à-vis BLM over that year, because Apple stores just don’t hold the same cachet as the United States Capitol does to me.

And so, I just got so enraged. And then I got a little depressed, even, because I would go online, and I obviously saw the president’s built-out website for this, which was very incongruent with how I understood the day and these individuals. And I don’t know that we’re going to be in a better place 20 years from now. And I don’t know how American students growing up will have the same sort of historical experience that I did, where you had the American history textbook, and that was history.

Now, part of me sort of revisited whether I should have felt that way when I was in eighth grade. And a lot of people dispute that. But I just increasingly worry that we will no longer be a society that will produce a largely universal historical textbook.

And so I had a hard time reading this book. Again, no discredit to your work on it.

Jalonick: That’s really interesting. Yeah, it’s interesting to hear what people think when they read it.

Fung: We’re about out of time, but I just wanted to also express another reaction that I had, which was kind of gratitude for giving voice — especially to the police officers, the detectives, Metro PD, the people who don’t have — reporters have a voice, members of Congress and senators obviously have a platform to articulate their experiences and express them. But the people cleaning up the Capitol and the staff and the law enforcement folks seldom do have that voice. And so your book, I was grateful that I was able to hear from them about that day. So thank you very much for that.

Jalonick: I tried to get as much as I could.

Richer: Well, Mary Clare, thank you so much for writing this book. It’s published by Public Affairs. It was released on January 6, just a few days ago. It’s available on Amazon. I got the hardback copy because I’m trying to use my phone less and get off screen. But of course the Kindle copy is available, as is the audiobook. So please check it out if you’re interested in a story-by-story narrative of this day.

Thanks to everyone who joined us. If you have any recommendations as far as what we should be reading for next week, we’ll also try to send out in advance what we’re reading so you can take a peek and join us for that.

Archon, you want to send us home?

Fung: Yeah, great. So we’ll be back same time next week, Tuesday, with the livestream.

Meanwhile, you can find a recording of today’s show on the Ash Center’s YouTube channel. And tomorrow, audio versions will be available on Google, Apple, Spotify — wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. And special thanks to our production team: Colette, Courtney, Dana, and Evelyn.

Jalonick: Thank you so much for having me.

Fung: Thank you so much. Take care.