Stormclouds Over the Capitol
Mary Clare Jalonick’s oral history of the 6 January riot is an important corrective to the second Trump administration’s vandalism of the historical record.
A review of Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6th by Mary Clare Jalonick, 336 pages, PublicAffairs (January 2026)
When I was a callow graduate student majoring in history, I was told by a crusty old empiricist that what is left out of a historical account determines whether a chronicler is trustworthy or biased. By and large, Mary Clare Jalonick is not an ideological axe-grinder—politically, it is obvious that she was never a Trump voter, but she acknowledges the validity of his presidential election victories in 2016 and 2024. And in this excellent oral history of the 6 January 2021 riots, she includes evidence that complicates the orthodox anti-Trump position that the invaders were a mob activated solely by the outgoing president’s incendiary rhetoric.
On 5 and 6 January 2021, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters travelled to Washington, DC, in support of the president’s false claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats.” Trump demanded that his vice president Mike Pence and Congress refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory on account of alleged election irregularities for which no evidence has yet been produced. There is no way that Trump can have been unaware of an armed faction in the audience of the rally he addressed at noon on 6 January, some of whom were wearing tactical gear, bearing guns, and carrying holstered bear spray designed to stop a 500–1,000-pound (around 226–450-kilo) animal. As Congress began the solemn work of certifying the presidential election results, Trump was bellowing from the podium and beseeching his disciples to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Jalonick dispenses with MAGA’s claims of a stolen election, pointing out that Biden’s legitimate victory was “certified by election officials from both parties in all 50 states.” Trump’s own attorney general, she adds, “said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have altered results in the states Biden won.” Nevertheless, Americans from all walks of life believed the election was corrupt and heeded Trump’s call to prevent Pence from completing the electoral count. Relying on interviews, FBI reports, and court transcripts, Jalonick acknowledges that “multiple people will have different memories of the day.” Some of those in attendance regarded the riot as nothing more serious than “a picnic” outside the Capitol. Others stormed the building and saw violence within it. Pamela Hemphill, a retired drug-and-alcohol counsellor from Idaho thinks what happened that day was “just a protest. No big deal … a love in.” Joe Munchillo, a photographer, describes the crowd as “very militaristic.”
Jalonick challenges her own prior belief that Trump incited peaceful protesters to participate in violence by showing that two MAGA militias calling themselves the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers arrived in Washington hoping for an insurrection. According to Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, the group was already stocking weapons in Virginia and preparing for war two days after the November 2020 election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” he declared in an encrypted group chat on 5 November. “Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.” In two open letters to Trump posted in December 2020, Rhodes also urged him to “invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the military to block a Biden presidency.”
