Biden and Trump marked two starkly different versions of Jan. 6. Voters are divided too

WASHINGTON ? For Donald Trump, Jan. 6, 2021, was “a beautiful day.” For Joe Biden, it was the day "we nearly lost America."

As the nation passed the third anniversary of the nation's most serious insurrection since the Civil War, the contrasting views encapsulate how Trump and Biden are approaching the 2024 campaign. And their split over Jan. 6 has become a lightning rod, revealing a troubling rift for Americans ? even after more than 890 pled guilty or were convicted on charges stemming from the insurrection, including by Trump-appointed judges.

For Trump, the charges he’s facing for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election are not about him.

“I’m being indicted for you,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, repeating a central theme of his campaign. “In the end, they’re not after me, they’re after you and I just happen to be standing in their way.”

For Biden, the attack on the U.S. Capitol epitomized why he ran for president and is running to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.

“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you,” Biden said Friday in a critique of Trump that was unusually direct and hard-hitting. “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

Biden looked to George Washington to remind Americans of the ideals on which the nation was founded, including the peaceful transition of power. Trump had Iowa Republicans cheering his hours-long speeches that included his dismissal of Jan. 6, which he insisted was done "patriotically and peacefully."

Just as Trump and Biden make opposite arguments for why democracy is at stake in this year’s election, the latest USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll showed most voters are worried about threats to democracy but are divided over who to blame. Forty percent surveyed at the end of December said Democrats were chiefly responsible for the threat; another 40% said Republicans were.

The survey also showed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters has increased among the voting public, despite more than 1,250 people having been charged in the attack.

Leaders of two groups ? four of the Proud Boys and two of the Oath Keepers ? were convicted of the most serious charge of seditious conspiracy. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio received the longest prison sentence yet at 22 years.

Dig deeper: Biden says democracy is in peril. Did he move fast enough to prevent another Jan. 6?

“Obviously, there’s a lot of memory shaping happening,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University. “With an event like this that’s controversial, you always have political partisans who are trying to tell the nation how to understand it.”

Jan. 6 has become a cultural flashpoint and a symbol. It’s the subject of a documentary by The Epoch Times, a news outlet The New York Times calls "a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation" and “one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.” The Jan. 6 attack shows up as key plot twist in  “The Morning Show,” a streaming Apple TV show featuring Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon.

And it’s unquestionably a rallying cry for Trump’s base who believe the former president’s rebranding of the day as a “peaceful march” against a “rigged election.” Social media algorithms cull and curate this false version of events for anyone who wants to believe it; Trump provides the catchy soundbites that are remixed and reshared on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks.

It’s easy for Trump supporters to find something to latch on to that gives them the permission to back Trump, despite the clear evidence that he lost the 2020 election, Mercieca said.

“As a scholar of public discourse, it's fascinating for me,” Mercieca said. “But it's dangerous, of course, for American politics.”

During a series of campaign appearances in Iowa – where the former president has a big lead going into the Republican caucus on Jan. 15 – Trump called the people convicted of Jan. 6 crimes “hostages.” He repeated false assertions about the 2020 election results and called his own myriad indictments “a badge of honor.”

“The whole thing is very unfair,” he said. “Those J6 hostages going to jail for 20 years? 18 years? Doctors, lawyers, carpenters, electricians, truck drivers. It will go down as one of the saddest things in the history of our country.”

In Pennsylvania, Biden reached back to the winter of 1777 to deliver a different history lesson. He stood in silence as National Park Service rangers laid a wreath at the base of the 60-foot-tall arch that memorializes the arrival of Washington and the Continental army into Valley Forge.

Washington and his ragtag army, Biden later said, were fighting for the revolutionary idea that “everyday people can govern themselves without a king or dictator.”

The Jan. 6 mob that attacked the Capitol, Biden said, stormed right past a portrait depicting Washington resigning his commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental army ? not the only time he willingly gave up power rather than seize more.

By contrast, Biden said, “Trump’s lies” about the 2020 election brought a mob to Washington. Not calling them off was “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history,” he continued in a speech lasting more than a half-hour that accused Trump of rewriting the facts of Jan. 6 to try to “steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.”

“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American,” Biden said, calling the preservation of democracy the “central cause of my presidency.”

For David Jacobs, a registered Republican from Long Island, New York, Jan. 6 did seem like a coordinated assault on democracy.

“And I think that it was aided and abetted by Donald Trump,” said Jacobs, a 42-year-old physician. “He could have halted the whole thing, and he encouraged it.”

But Joyce Masumoto, a 78-year-old Republican from Orange County, Calif., thinks Trump is getting too much blame for Jan. 6, even though “I wasn’t happy with his response and what he did.”

“It seems like continuously they’re trying to trample over Trump,” said Masumoto, who thinks Democrats are the threat to democracy.

In Sioux City, Iowa, Trump rallied other Republicans who shared that view.

“Is there anybody in this room that’s not going to vote for Trump?” the former president asked. “No, don’t raise your hand ? it could be dangerous. They’re going to say, ‘He incited an insurrection,’ these stupid bastards. He incited an insurrection! But quietly raise your hand. Is there anybody here that’s not going to vote for Trump?”

The room was packed with supporters in “Make America Great Again” caps and beanies. The blue backdrop hanging behind him was emblazoned with “Trump Country.” No one raised their hand.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump, Biden competing views on democracy threats, Jan. 6 anniversary