Jan. 6 rioter Stephen Ayres isn’t nearly as deserving of our sympathy as the U.S. Capitol police officers to whom he apologized this week.
Still, I did feel for him as he testified about being conned into marching off to stop a steal that Donald Trump knew wasn’t happening.
And if we keep prosecuting insurrectionist minnows like Ayres — 874 rioters had been arrested at last count — but then let the flounder-in-chief swim free of the net, the former president’s coup attempt will have succeeded, not in denying Joe Biden’s rightful election, but by doing grave damage to our democracy.
Because even if Trump never again sets foot in the White House, even for a holiday party, he will not just have undermined confidence in our democracy, but will have wrecked it beyond rehab. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln said. Our 45th president will make this one a teardown still unless we hold him accountable.
If Trump isn’t prosecuted for trying to hold onto power through an unprecedented jumble of illegal schemes, who will be able to say, even aspirationally, that in America, no one is above the law?
Trump’s army of those willing to be conned is not innocent.
Because as Rep. Liz Cheney said of the former president himself, in response to efforts to defend him as having been manipulated by the “crazies” who were his outside advisers, “Donald Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
So yes, those who stormed the Capitol are, if not responsible adults, still responsible for what they did that day. Yet I believe Ayres when he says that with “horse blinders” blocking his full view of the facts, he really believed that it was Trump who had won the 2020 presidential election, and Trump who was being cheated.
“At the time, yeah. Everything I was seeing online, I definitely believed that was the case. I was very upset, as were most of his supporters. That’s basically what got me to come down here.”
For 20 years, the 39-year-old who describes himself as a family man who loves his country had worked for a cabinet company near his hometown of Champion, Ohio, population 9,005. But since answering Trump’s tweeted call to action and driving six hours to Washington to become part of the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol last January, he’s lost his job and sold his home.
“It changed my life, not for the good,” Ayres told the congressional committee investigating the insurrection. “Definitely not for the better.”
In exchange for pleading guilty to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, he’s had a bunch of other charges dropped and will be sentenced in September.
That the former president is still making the same old bogus claims about election fraud “makes me mad,” Ayres said. “I was hanging on every word he was saying. Everything he was putting out, I was following it.”
Now, he says to others like him, “take the blinders off. Make sure you step back and see what’s going on before it’s too late.”
His apology to several of the 140 officers who rioters hurt that day was better than no apology, even if it doesn’t change anything.
But where are the apologies from the many Republican officeholders who have known all along that Trump didn’t win, but still misled their constituents by voting against certifying President Joe Biden’s electoral victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania?
In California, those who should express some contrition include Reps. Ken Calvert, Mike Garcia, Darrell Issa, Doug LaMalfa, Kevin McCarthy, and Jay Obernolte, as well as former Rep. Devin Nunes, who has since left Congress.
They are at least as responsible as rioters are for the fact that U.S. Capitol Staff Sgt. Aquilino Gonell will never work in law enforcement again as a result of the injuries he suffered on that day.
Because their actions, and those of every other career-minded coward who refused to tell the truth that Trump had lost, period, made the insurrection not only possible but guaranteed.
Because these officeholders had every reason to know better, they are at least as guilty as the 50 Californians charged with having participated in the insurrection they did nothing to prevent.
Most responsible of all, though, is that small man in a big suit, refusing to concede an election he knew he’d lost and indifferent still to the deaths his selfish lies caused.
If all of the nearly 1,000 people who’ve been arrested for trying to overthrow our government are leading us to the man who most deserves to be held to account, that’s one thing.
But most Americans don’t think he ever will be made to pay, probably because in Trump’s whole rule-bending, norm-flouting, promise and vows, and contract-breaking life, he never has been.
And if that is what happens, it will hurt our country almost as much as what Trump was trying to pull.
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