WASHINGTON (AP) — Five years ago, outside the White House, the outgoing US President Donald Trump told a crowd of his supporters to head to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — in protest as Congress was affirming the 2020 election victory for Democrat Joe Biden.

A short time later, the world watched as the seat of US power descended into chaos, and democracy hung in the balance.

On the fifth anniversary of January 6, 2021, there is no official event to memorialize what happened that day, when the mob made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, battled police at the Capitol barricades, and stormed inside, as lawmakers fled. The political parties refuse to agree on a shared history of the events, which were broadcast around the globe. And the official plaque honoring the police who defended the Capitol has never been hung.

Instead, Trump will meet privately with House Republicans at the Kennedy Center, which the president has rebranded to carry his own name, for a policy forum. Democrats will hold a hearing with witnesses to the violence and later gather on the Capitol steps to mark the memory of what happened.

And the former leader of the militant Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, is staging a midday march retracing the rioters’ steps from the White House to the Capitol to honor Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt and others who died in the January 6 siege and its aftermath.

“I ask those that are able to attend please do so,” Tarrio said on social media feed X.

Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for having orchestrated the January 6 attack, and he is among more than 1,500 defendants who saw their charges dropped when Trump issued a sweeping pardon on his return to the White House last year. “This will be a PATRIOTIC........

© The Times of Israel