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Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.

That same day, he pardons more than 1500 people who were convicted of crimes during the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Dozens of those pardoned are from Florida, more than any other state.

We'll talk about this with Daniel Ruth, Ray Arsenault, Rosemary Goodrow, O'Hara, and Stanley Gray.

Next on Florida this week.

We.

Welcome back, Donald J. Trump of Palm Beach was sworn in as the nation's 47th president on Monday.

He became the first Florida resident to hold the office.

Just a few hours later, he pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of more than 1500 people charged with crimes in connection with the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

>> First, we have a list of pardons and commutations relating to events that occurred on January 6th, 2021.

>> Okay.

And how many people is this?

I think this order will apply to approximately 1500 people, sir.

So this is January 6th.

These are the hostages.

Approximately 1500 for a pardon?

Yes.

Full pardon.

Full pardon or commutation.

Full pardon.

The pardons are a culmination of Trump's effort to rewrite the history of the January 6th attack, which left several people dead and injured more than 140 people and caused millions of Millions of dollars in damage to the Capitol.

Among the defendants, 608 were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers.

174 of them were accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon.

More than 1000 people pleaded guilty, while 261 were convicted in court.

Others were awaiting trial.

Trump defended the pardons in an interview Wednesday night.

Look, you know how many people are talking about 1500 people?

Almost all of them are.

Should not have been there should not have happened.

And the other thing is this, um, some of those people with the police.

True.

But they were very minor incidents.

Okay.

You know, they get built up by that.

A couple of fake guys that are on CNN all the time.

Nobody watches.

They were very minor incidents.

The incident was not minor to Capitol Hill police officers who defended Congress from the onslaught.

Here's what they told the January 6th committee.

>> I could feel myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself, this is how I'm going to die defending this entrance.

>> A man attempted to rip the baton from my hands and we wrestled for control.

I retained my weapon.

After I pushed him back, he yelled at me, you're on the wrong team.

Another takes a different tack, shouting you will die on your knees!

>> Hours later, Hodges was nearly crushed in a key doorway.

A man seized the opportunity of my vulnerability.

He grabbed the front of my gas mask and used it to beat my head against the door.

>> They ripped off my badge.

They grabbed and stripped me of my radio.

They seized ammunition that was secured to my body.

They began to beat me with their fists and with what felt like hard metal objects.

At one point, I came face to face with an attacker who repeatedly lunged for me and attempted to remove my firearm.

I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser.

At the At the hospital, doctors told me that I had suffered a heart attack and I was later diagnosed with a concussion, a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Joining us now on the panel, Rosemary Goudreau O'Hara is the former editorial page editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Ray Arsenault is an author, historian, and the John Hope Franklin Professor of History, emeritus at USF Saint Petersburg.

Daniel Ruth is the Honors College Visiting professor of professional practice at USF in Tampa.

And Stanley Gray is the former president of the Hillsborough County Urban League, a businessman, and is currently not affiliated with the political party.

Nice to have all of you here.

Thanks for coming.

Thank you.

Daniel, I got to ask you, the president said that this is a minor incident and that these folks were hostages.

What was your take?

>> The president is a bold faced liar.

What he did the other day was to give a big middle finger not only to the nation, but to our judicial system and to our law enforcement community.

He has called this a day of love.

I love my wife.

I love you.

I love my dog.

I love all kinds of things.

I know love.

That was not love.

That was a day of hate.

And it will.

It is a day that will live in infamy.

Throughout the rest of this country's history.

And the people think about this.

When he ran for president, he had all these he had these meetings with all these sheriffs standing behind him, and police officers and police chiefs and all these people.

He was he was pimping himself out as a law and order guy.

Those guys were played for chumps.

I cannot conceive of a single law enforcement officer in this country that believes that this was a good idea.

So, Ray, how do you view this?

Is this a turning point in the history of the country?

How do you view this?

>> Well, I fear that it is really, um, I think, like a lot of people in sort of a state of shock because I didn't really think that Trump would, Tilt so far to the extremist end of things, you know that.

But I guess I was wrong.

Um, they talk about shock and awe, and I think it's an attempt to challenge the rule of law, to intimidate people, to make them fearful.

Um, there's never been anything quite like it in American history.

We've had autocratic figures before, but no one who has really tried to make everyone identify with his his point of view.

I mean, it's just a level of autocracy that I think the United States has, has never seen.

And on a personal note, I feel insulted because January 6th is my birthday and it's forever ruined.

It used to be epiphany on the 12th day of Christmas.

Now it's insurrection day.

Stanley, what message does this send to federal employees, do you think?

I think it really, um.

It's bad.

And let me tell you, one of the real reasons why he's already started his questioning and that is, is, you know, in the State Department trying to find out.

Are you loyal to him?

And my immediate response to that is, is that is he going to ask, did you vote for me or what policies do you disagree with me?

Again, this is beyond an autocracy.

This is like a fiefdom.

Rosemary, a lot of these defendants came from Florida.

Florida as a state had the most defendants there for January 6th crimes.

42 come from the Tampa Bay and Sarasota area.

What is it about Florida that sends so many people in the middle of January up there in the cold?

Yeah.

To to protest the outcome of the election.

>> You know, I don't have the answer for that.

Um, but Florida is is the hotbed is a reflection of the nation and does seem to generate both political leaders and political activists.

You know what I guess I wanted to say was that President Trump did call this a day of love, and it was a day of extreme violence.

And he called January 25th the day of liberation.

And for law abiding citizens, it was not a day of liberation.

You know, those who were put out on the street were as your as your entry intro said, you know, these were people who attacked police with bear spray and brass knuckles and chokeholds and electroshock to the neck and flagpoles and, um, you know, metal whips and and a noose, a noose for former Vice President Mike pence.

And polls showed that 75% of Americans did not support pardons for people who brought dangerous or deadly weapons to the Capitol that day, including 55% of Republicans.

And a similar number did not didn't support pardons for those who attacked Capitol Hill police.

I really loved the headline written by the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same person who owns Fox News.

And that headline said, President Trump pardons February 6th cop beaters.

Law and order.

Back the blue.

What happened to that GOP.

In the concerning thing here, too?

If I can, if I can make the point is he gave he is now he pardoned these people.

He's also, by default issued a permission slip.

Our political violence is already at a razor's on a razor's edge.

And now these people are going to be compelled to believe it's okay to do what I did.

And Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys.

Proud Boys has said that in all these lives of other people, Stewart Rhodes, they're all they're all talking about vengeance now and retribution.

Let's play what he said.

No state has more January 6th defendants than Florida.

About 140 are from here.

About 42 are from the Tampa Bay area.

Among those pardoned was Enrique Tarrio of Miami, the leader of the Proud Boys, a right wing group which the ADL says is an extremist group with a history of using violence, targeted harassment and intimidation to achieve their political goals.

Tarrio was released from 22 years in prison after being found guilty of seditious conspiracy in 2023 for his part in the attack on the Capitol.

When he arrived as a free man this week in South Florida, he called for an investigation of the Justice Department officials who prosecuted him.

>> They should be investigated, and if they committed any crimes, they should be prosecuted.

And Nathan Talk of Orlando was another January 6th defendant who was freed this week, according to the Justice Department.

He Tuck pushed his way into the Capitol past a line of Capitol Police officers making physical contact with at least one officer as he did so.

After leaving the building, he bragged in a text message conversation with family members that he had fought the police.

Tuck says he has no remorse for his actions.

Here's what he told Wkmg-tv in Orlando.

>> What do you say to people across the country, around the world who still are concerned or think that this was something that was not democratic and that was something that was considered a bad thing?

I would tell them.

>> Get over it.

I can care less what you think.

And Rosemary, that's the way a lot of these defendants are.

There's there's no remorse.

They're not apologizing.

There's no regret.

And I got to say that Vice President JD Vance said peaceful protesters should qualify for pardons.

But he said if you committed violence on that day, obviously you should not be pardoned.

And Attorney General designate Pam Bondi told the senators at her confirmation hearing, I will look at every case on a case by case basis.

But their statements conflicted with what Donald Trump did.

Yeah, no, it shows that the unpredictability of President Trump's decision making.

He himself had said in November that he was going to look at a case by case basis.

But then it was reported in, in Axios that as the deadline for a day, one decision on this came near, he said, and I'm going to paraphrase him, screw it, release them all.

This was a big day for extremist groups.

I mean, beforehand, these 1500 cases was the biggest, um, uh, effort by the US Justice Department in history.

And President Biden had, you know, refocused from foreign terrorism into what he saw as the bigger issue was domestic extremism.

And now we've got members of the Proud Boys marching, and they had fallen apart.

While these guys were in jail.

Their leadership, they were pointing fingers.

They were even apologizing back then.

Now we've got them marching on the streets of Washington.

We've got Enrique wanting to be secretary of the Department of Retaliation, and we've got the the Oath Keeper guy meeting with our very own Gus Bilirakis on Capitol Hill, the scene of the crime.

I mean, these guys deserve consequences, not an open door.

Okay, so are.

There parallels in history to this?

Not in this country.

I think that if you were really looking for a parallel, you could probably start in Germany starting from the mid 30s.

And all of these things that, that, that are going on right now.

We're all concerned.

But for many of American citizens this has been normalized.

And, you know, and I'm really concerned because when you look at history in the state of Florida, has more lynchings than any other state in the United States.

If you look at the rise of anti-Semitic crimes.

You have basically just given them a key to continue or to start over.

Permission slip.

And that's exactly what I believe is going to happen.

Right.

I think it's very similar, as Stanley said, to Germany in the 1930s, but also Italy.

You know, you see this pattern with Mussolini of kind of merging the military with a kind of private police force, people who are kind of sanctioned to or empowered to commit violence.

And that was the essence of fascism.

And I know people over the time have have been very careful about using that term, but I think we really are dealing with an embryonic phase of fascism.

And I know, I know, I have a lot of friends who talk about, you know, MAGA fascists and people who don't normally use that kind of language.

But it's I think the, the, the, the obvious intent was to, well, sort of like a football analogy of flooding the zone.

He's doing so many extreme things, you can't even keep up with them.

And to really put people in a kind of shock situation.

Daniel, I've got to ask, did outgoing President Biden make a mistake, though?

Because he issued blanket pardons to his families, to family members, to his political allies for crimes that.

It's apples and oranges, as far as I'm concerned, because.

Does that give Trump a pass?

I suppose he will hang his hat on on that.

But his incoming administration and his incoming Justice Department and his incoming FBI, that crazy nut, Kash Patel, they were all threatening to go after the so-called Biden crime family.

And if I think if any one of us at this table were the president of the United States, and we have been confronted with that same dilemma, we would have done the exact same thing.

I think that there's even more I think that people need to look at the fact that, like when you look at the Biden family, how many times have they been investigated?

Okay.

How many times have you found something?

I think the pardons that President Biden gave were purely economical driven because it cost so much money to defend yourselves.

And maybe I'm just trying to, you know, whitewash it.

But I believe that the reason why he did it was to save their economic positions.

>> You know, Rob.

My father flew 50 combat missions over World War Two.

And as a young man, he was 21 years old.

Stanley is a graduate of the Naval Academy and served this country in uniform as a marine officer.

And what this what what happened here, again, is a slap in the face of every person, law enforcement and military, who has put their lives on the line for this country, as you did a while ago.

And my father did, you know, back in the 1940s.

It is a horrible, horrible message that he's sending to this country.

Well, let's look at what some federal prosecutors and police officials in South Florida had to say about the pardons.

>> I would not be a pardon for anybody that attacked our house on January 6th, but especially those that attacked the men and women of law of law enforcement and I it's just it's incomprehensible to me.

>> Mike Fanone was one of the D.C. police officers injured that day.

He said this on CNN last night.

Rest assured, I have been betrayed by my country.

>> I was sick to my stomach.

I was appalled, and I was almost more appalled by the fact that it's an attempt to erase history.

It certainly leaves the prosecutors who were involved in these cases with a very empty feeling in the pit of their stomach.

>> This is a slap in the face to law enforcement officials and prosecutors and everyone who believes in the rule of law.

Donald Trump ran on always having the backs of law enforcement back the blue.

But you cannot back the blue if you pardon people who attack police officers.

Rosemary, what does this do to the rule of law?

Excuse me?

You know, there's this conceit that there are hundreds of Trump fans who have been rotting in jail for nothing more than walking onto the Capitol grounds, and that is just not the case.

The U.S. Attorney's Office said it it did not file charges in hundreds of cases of people whose only offense was entering restricted territory.

They didn't do that.

These people, these innocent the people of the 1500 as your as your stats showed, you know, over 600 of them were attacked police.

And so these were not just people who went walked into the Capitol.

These were people who, um, who committed crimes and were violent.

And, you know, it.

What it says is that, um, so long as you're on my side of the political on my on my team, uh, you know, it's okay.

I'll let you off.

Right?

Yeah.

I mean, I think one of the lessons of all of this is that we're following almost a kind of Soviet model in the sense of a two class society.

You're either with Trump like you're you'd be a party member in the Soviet Union, or you're against him.

And he's trying to obviously, to maximize his part of it.

And I think it's particularly critical here in Florida.

I mean, he's trying to make Florida the headquarters of of MAGA land and pinpointing all of these Floridians to the to to the, to the cabinet.

And I think governor DeSantis is sort of following on his coattails.

And so even though there are rivals, he's trying to keep up with them.

And just in the last couple of days, it's kind of very extremist suggestions about immigrant restriction and and so.

Suspicion is trumping country.

Excuse me.

Ambition is trumping country.

Yes, absolutely.

Not only were the rioters trying to violently stop the certification of the election, some of them held racist views.

Here's officer Harry Dunn, who confronted the rioters in the In the Capitol.

>> I do my best to keep politics out of my job, but in this circumstance I responded, well, I voted for Joe Biden.

Does my vote not count?

Am I nobody?

That prompted a torrent of racial epithets.

One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, you hear that, guys?

This voted for Joe Biden.

Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people, joined in screaming, boo!

No one had ever, ever called me a while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer.

Stanley.

Some of the rioters had Nazi paraphernalia.

Some were calling for civil war.

I mean, there's a there's a real they're.

All they're all one and the same pure, plain, simple.

And and I'm going to kind of switch this here.

You know, the nominee to be the secretary of defense.

Have you seen his tattoos?

White nationalist tattoos.

They are Christian nationalists.

He can say what he wants to, but as an African American, that's suspect to me.

That's suspect.

When you.

The MAGA flag, the rebel flag.

Don't tread on me.

They all mean the same thing.

Is there a racist?

You guys all agree that there's a racist subtext to this?

Absolutely no one.

No one wants to talk about it.

But it is okay.

And it's just I just find it so interesting how they exclude certain people from that.

Okay.

I mean, you know, like, we were talking about the growth of the Puerto Rican vote in this, this last election.

But their victims, they just don't know it.

Okay.

Their turn just hasn't come.

And I think race is at the heart of it.

I mean, this whole thing began, I think, with a kind of hysterical reaction to Barack Obama's election.

And it has just gotten completely out of control, led to this kind of extremism that we've never really seen before in American history.

And I know I sound like a like a broken record on this topic, but I also think that one under other underlying cause here is that we have a national crisis of civic illiteracy.

So these people are stupid and stupid people are easily manipulated.

And I think that's part of what we're looking at here, I think is.

A bigger dangerous.

I think that's something dangerous to say.

I think part of the reason that our country is divided is that MAGA world believes that elites look down on on them.

And I think it's true that elites do look down on them.

And that therefore they are never going to hear what it is that you or I or you know what?

What others have to say.

I do believe that MAGA world believes that the world has changed, and somehow they got the short end of the stick and that that in some part that the woke agenda has kept them from being able to have the same opportunities as other people.

So I don't condone it, but I think that it's imperative that we understand that people who voted for Trump, a lot of these people believed that, um, that that the left had gone too far.

I mean, they do believe the election was stolen.

They believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

I can't help but disagree with you.

I mean, well, excuse me, I can't help but agree with you.

Oh, okay.

And my reason for agreeing with you is, is that we no longer.

Like.

When I was growing up, we had two papers.

One was kind of liberal.

One was kind of conservative.

Okay.

And people who were trying to be learned, they kind of read both and they figured out their own way.

Well, now papers, newspapers are going away.

Let's just tell the truth.

Okay.

And the only reason why they're around is for the advertisements.

Um, and then now you have people who control the media that everyone uses, and they're saying, well, we're not going to censor it anymore.

So now you can come up with your message and you can see it.

And you've seen this in play.

The first Trump election and then the second, this is this is the blueprint.

And this is not good.

Because now what people are going to be able to do is just sell pure emotion as opposed to facts.

Right.

And we're we have gone.

Excuse me.

The first election was the change of the direction we're being entrenched now.

So I was going to go to the story of the week, but I wanted to hear what your thoughts were.

Well, I really think that race is at the center of a lot of this, frankly.

I think racial scapegoating and maybe ethnic or religious, but or baiting elites or transgender people.

But it's a classic scapegoating model.

And of course, the pardons in particular, I think, are justifying the continuation of the big lie that that he was the election of 2020 was stolen from him.

And this is his major statement on that, that these people are heroes, they're patriots.

He's going to invite him to the white Rather than being the criminals that they are.

It's very quickly.

It's worth noting that after January 6th, Donald Trump never called a single one of those police officers who were injured.

He never contacted any of the families of the police officers, officers who died.

Never once did he attempt to reach out to these people who were attempting to defend democracy that day.

Rosemary, what's your take on why this idea persists that the 2020 election was stolen?

I mean, where does why does that still have life after four years or five years?

And after all the court cases in which the challenges to the election were turned down by courts, both with Republican judges and judges appointed by Democrats?

No judge found that there was any wrongdoing during the 2020 election.

Yeah.

No.

The the Trump campaign brought cases in the six swing states that would have turned the election had they voted differently to Trump?

I the people who believed that the election was stolen.

I believe it's still that we have divided into echo chambers, and they are in a media tunnel that that is reinforced and they don't believe.

They don't believe the mainstream media.

They don't trust government.

They don't trust the courts.

All right.

Well, thank you for.

I don't just I don't know how to describe this conversation, but thank you for a good discussion.

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