For Trump, the debate was a new chapter in the rewrite of January 6

Halfway through Thursday evening’s presidential debate, the moderators asked former President Donald Trump questions about January 6.

With so much attention on President Biden’s mixed performance, it could be easy to overlook Trump’s response.

Trump seized the moment to transform the debate stage – with the largest audience he has seen since his presidency – into the latest theater for his years-long attempt to rewrite the story of January 6, 2021. And he twice ignored questions about whether he would accept the results of the next election, before agreeing to do so only under certain conditions.

Over the course of several conversations with Biden and the moderators, Jake Tapper and CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump downplayed the most damaging attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, wrongly blamed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the day’s security lapses and defended the more than 1,000 people who have been charged with participating in the deadly violence.

It was the latest step in Trump’s attempt to see whether his ongoing lies about Jan. 6 — an alternative narrative he tells about the day that was once a fodder for far-right audiences — can also win over mainstream voters.

And critics of the former president say that as troubling as Biden’s performance was, Trump’s embrace of Jan. 6 and his refusal to agree to an unconditional acceptance of democratic elections were even worse.

“It’s a concerted effort to try to rid January 6 of guns,” said former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who served on the House select committee that investigated the day’s events and who endorsed Biden this week. “It’s part of creating this total confusion where the average person says, ‘I know what I saw on January 6, but maybe I didn’t see what I saw.'”

‘You could feel it’

Trump has called Jan. 6, when rioters angry over his election loss attacked the Capitol, a beautiful day. He has often leaned on his Republican allies in the House of Representatives to defend and re-litigate his actions that day, for which he was impeached. In recent months, Trump has been increasingly vocal in his support of the people charged in connection with the day’s events — a group he has called “warriors” and “hostages.”

He scored another victory on that front on Friday when the Supreme Court ruled that the Justice Department had improperly used an obstruction law in charging some of the Jan. 6 defendants. “Big news!” Trump posted on his social media site, while amplifying another post that called the case a big win for “J6 political prisoners.”

On Thursday night, it was Tapper, not Biden, who first raised the issue onstage, asking Trump what he would say to voters who believe he violated his constitutional oath when he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol — and then sat there in silence for hours as the crowd turned violent.

According to Trump, that day was auspicious—because he was still president, after all. “On January 6th, we were energy independent. We had the lowest taxes ever. We had the lowest regulations ever. On January 6th, we were respected around the world,” Trump said.

Trump claimed his words that day were peaceful and patriotic, but he appeared to acknowledge that he had sensed things could turn violent — even though it was he who had urged his supporters to come to Washington that day in the first place, promising them it would be “wild.”

“I could see what was happening. Everyone said they were going to be there. I said, ‘You know what? There’s a lot of people coming.’ You could feel it.”

Trump falsely claimed that he offered Pelosi, a Democrat, 10,000 National Guard troops but she rejected them. He downplayed the clashes between rioters and police and bragged about the size of the crowd he addressed that day.

“No one ever talks about that,” Trump said. “They’re talking about a relatively small number of people who went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by police.”

He then defended those arrested and accused of taking part in the violence, a cause he had slowly but surely stoked during his presidency.

“What they did to some people who were so innocent, you should be ashamed of yourself, what you did – how you destroyed the lives of so many people,” Trump said.

Biden misses important opening

Twice Bash asked Trump to commit to respecting the outcome of the upcoming election, and twice he dodged her. When she asked a third time, his acquiescence was accompanied by caveats and another lie.

“If it’s a fair, legal, good election — absolutely,” Trump said, without specifying what he would consider a “good” election.

“I would have much rather accepted this, but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous,” he added. There is no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.

It was an important opening for Biden, but not one he effectively seized — and some of his supporters worry it’s bad for democracy and for his campaign. In muddled answers, Biden reached further into the past, recalling how Trump had failed to condemn the white nationalist group the Proud Boys when he and Biden debated in 2020, and how he had equivocated after white supremacists in 2017 had marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But he failed to deliver a memorable blow to Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and also refused to back down from Trump’s false claims that the House committee suppressed evidence while investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

“What he wants people to think about January 6 is just a complete lie,” said Kinzinger, calling Trump an “existential threat” to the country.

“Democrats have to make a decision on what their strongest hand is to do that,” Kinzinger said. “I’m on everyone’s side except Trump.”

The John Fetterman Guide to Surviving a Bad Debate

Earlier today, my colleagues reported that Biden’s shaky debate performance has led some Democrats — including some longtime Biden allies — to openly question whether they can or should replace him.

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, is not one of them.

Fetterman, remember, had his own disastrous debate against Republican Mehmet Oz in the fall of 2022. He was still recovering from a stroke at the time, and his halting and unsteady debate performance sent Democrats into a tailspin. They feared that one bad night in Harrisburg would cost them the Senate.

“I’ve been through that,” Fetterman told me via FaceTime this morning. “People lost their minds after my debate. Maybe we can learn something from that.”

Fetterman said he knew at the time that the debate wasn’t going well. And the backlash was painful. But he ended up winning by almost 5 percentage points.

“Just got back on the saddle and just kept going. Just put yourself out there — that’s what I did, and lean into it,” Fetterman said.

Biden appeared to follow that playbook Friday when he appeared at a rally in Raleigh, N.C., and delivered a much stronger performance than Thursday night — albeit with a teleprompter and far fewer people watching.

“I don’t speak as fluently as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong,” Biden said.

It was a challenging performance that seemed to signal he has no plans to drop out. A social media show of support from former President Barack Obama reinforced the image of party unity.

It’s unclear whether the freakout will end here. But Fetterman says it should.

“I don’t want,” he said, “to abandon a great president after one bad debate, any more than I want to be abandoned after a difficult debate.”