Watching GOP members who were photographed participating in the January 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C., was “almost comical,” former President Bill Clinton writes in his new book, Citizen: My Life After The White House.
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Clinton details the aftermath of the event in a lenghty excerpt published on MSNBC today. “Many of the Republican members of Congress who hid behind desks, stacked furniture against office doors to keep rioters out, or fled to safety, denounced the attacks right after they occurred,” he explained.
“Sadly, after Trump denied what happened, even criticizing the law enforcement officers who risked their lives to protect members of both parties, most Republicans completely changed their tunes.”
After President-elect Donald Trump asked those supporters who they believed — themselves, or himself — Clinton adds that “those who looked to Trump and said, ‘You, Master,’ lived to fight another day” while those who refused to go with Trump’s line “either left government service or were tossed out by the voters in their gerrymandered districts.”
“It was almost comical to watch some of the GOP members who’d been photographed defending themselves whitewash the entire episode. The Republicans’ alleged support for the police mysteriously evaporated when it came to the officers who were killed or injured defending the Capitol and members of both parties from Trump’s foot soldiers.”
Clinton also admits that Trump wasn’t the first person to “cast the law and facts aside to cling to power, but it was a parade he was glad to lead.” And while some thought Trump’s denial of the day’s events was a show of strength, Clinton concluded, “that’s how democracy disappears from the inside out.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, hundreds of supporters of Trump mobbed the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress as the results of the 2020 election were being certified. The FBI has since labeled the attack a case of domestic terrorism, and Trump himself appeared to give a speech in support of the people who led the event.
Citizen was published on Nov. 19, 2024. The book begins covers the time period on and following Jan. 20, 2001 — the day Clinton returned to life as a private citizen after 8 years in the White House. The book is described as “a front-row, first-person chronicle of his postpresidential years and the most significant events of the twenty-first century, including 9/11 and the runup to the Iraq War, the Haiti earthquake, the Great Recession, the January 6 insurrection, and the enduring culture wars of our time” and his follow-up to his 2004 releaese, My Life.