Next week, the private golf club that former President Donald Trump owns in Bedminster, New Jersey, will host a “J6 Awards Gala” to honor not the people who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, but the people who attacked it.
Trump is reportedly not expected to attend, although the Stand in the Gap Foundation, the organization behind the event, has boasted that they invited him to speak. But Trump doesn’t have to speak to let us know that he’s tied to this event. It’s being held on property he owns, and he has voiced support for the people who brutally attacked police officers during an attack on the Capitol. Last year, he spoke at a fundraiser held on the same golf course in support of the insurrectionists, and he praised the attackers as “patriots” and promised to pardon them, including those “who had attacked officers.”
And even if he doesn’t make it on September 5, the event’s website promises speeches from Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and former adviser Peter Navarro, who spent three months in jail for refusing to cooperate with a House committee investigation on January 6.
According to the event’s website, the J6 Awards Gala will “honor and celebrate the twenty defendants who contributed to the powerful song ‘Justice For All’” and “celebrate all J6 defendants who have shown incredible courage and sacrifice.”
It is bloodcurdling when a presidential candidate makes his estate available for an event where a mob attack on police officers is celebrated as heroic.
As for the song “Justice for All,” which Trump has his supporters stand for at his rallies, we know the identities of many of the singers from a May 2023 Washington Post report:
According to the Justice Department, Texas man Ryan Nichols drove to the Capitol based on the “belief that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.” Nichols, who pleaded guilty to two felonies including assaulting police officers, was wearing a bulletproof vest as he fired “two streams” of pepper spray, “striking multiple police officers.” Nichols also urged his fellow attackers to enter the Capitol with him, shouting, “If you have a gun, get your gun!” He was sentenced to five years in prison.
Before traveling from Texas to the Capitol, Shane Jenkins, another Texan, posted on social media: “I got some sog tomahawks and tactical knives, can I take those?” He was convicted of eight felonies and sentenced to seven years in prison. Prosecutors said he pulled a metal “Sog” tomahawk axe from his bag during the siege and used it to smash windows. He then “incited the crowd by telling other rioters, ‘Bro, we’re going into that f— building one way or another’ and ‘We paid for it; it’s our f— building.'” Prosecutors said he threw “nine different objects at the officers” protecting Congress that day.
Officer Brian Sicknick was among those pepper-sprayed by Julian Khater, another singer of the song “Justice for All.” Khater pleaded guilty to “assaulting police officers with pepper spray, causing bodily harm to the officers.” Sicknick died the next day.
Sarah McAbee, the organizer of this J6 awards gala, is married to Ronald Colton McAbee, a former Tennessee sheriff’s deputy who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for assaulting police officers with “reinforced knuckle gloves.” Even more despicable was McAbee’s act of holding down a police officer who had been “punched, kicked and robbed of his baton by other rioters,” allowing the crowd to brutally beat him.
These are not only the people Trump has promised to pardon and the people whose renditions of the national anthem he believes deserve applause, but they are also the people who are celebrated and appreciated at Trump National Golf Club.
The January 6 attack — as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves said when he testified before Congress in January — was “probably the largest mass attack on police officers in a single day in the history of our country.” Graves made clear that far more than the 140 officers originally reported suffered physical injuries that day — which, he added, doesn’t even include the dozens more who suffered mental trauma. And we’ve seen multiple officers die horrifically by suicide in connection with what they endured on January 6.
What Trump is doing and has done is not “treason,” at least not by the letter of the law. But he has repeatedly offered “aid and comfort” to those who carried out the first violent attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812, when the British set it on fire. Trump does not belong in the White House; he belongs in a jail cell, just like the people who will be feted next week at the horrible January 6 gala at his country club.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
