Congress to certify election victory four years after Jan. 6 riot | The Excerpt
On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: It’s been four years since Donald Trump supporters attacked the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying his election loss. It’s also the start to a new Trump era. USA TODAY White House Correspondent Michael Collins puts the day in context. Winter storms hit some 60 million Americans. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses why scientists are keeping a watchful eye on whether anyone is deliberately tampering with the atmosphere. Who won big at the Golden Globes?
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson, and today is Monday, January 6, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today, I look back and forward on January 6th, plus tens of millions of Americans get slammed with winter weather. And would we even know if anyone’s deliberately tampering with our atmosphere?
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President Joe Biden yesterday urged Americans to never forget the January 6, 2021 attack on their democracy and to not allow the history of that day to be rewritten. Biden wrote in an op-ed published by the Washington Post that in time there will be Americans who didn’t witness that day firsthand, but will learn about it from footage and testimony from what is written in history books. He added that we cannot allow the truth to be lost.
Today, four years to the day that supporters of Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol and tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election, Congress will usher in a new Trump era when it gathers to count each state’s electoral votes and officially declare him the winner of last year’s presidential contest. I caught up with USA TODAY White House correspondent Michael Collins to help put January 6th back in context and take a look at today’s proceedings. Michael, thanks for making some time today.
Michael Collins:
Thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Michael, just take us back to that day four years ago, if you would. What happened?
Michael Collins:
A mob of Donald Trump supporters staged a riot outside the Capitol. They broke into the building. They fought with police. Some of them broke into lawmakers offices. There’s a really famous photo of one of them sitting behind Nancy Pelosi’s desk. And the reason they did this was that they were trying to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. Donald Trump had lost that election to Joe Biden, but he refused to admit that he lost and he claimed the election was stolen and that there was widespread voter fraud, although there was no evidence of that.
So the way the process works, each state has an electoral college and after an election they count, each state counts electoral votes, and they send them to Washington where Congress later on in January counts the votes themselves and they certify the election. So on the day that Congress was to count those electoral votes four years ago, which was January 6, 2021, Donald Trump held a rally on the Ellipse, which is just off the National Mall. There were thousands of his supporters there, and he called on them to march down to Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, and in his words, “To fight like hell.” They did that and what they ended up doing was setting in motion the most violent attack on the Capitol since the war of 1812 when the British burned the building. Now, ultimately they failed in their goal. I mean, they did manage to delay the vote count, but ultimately it went on as planned and Joe Biden was declared the winner of that election.
Taylor Wilson:
Michael, more than a thousand people have been convicted for their actions on that day. I think this is the big question a lot of folks are asking, will Trump issue pardons for these folks?
Michael Collins:
Well, that’s what everybody is waiting to see. Donald Trump has pledged to pardon the defendants. He said that repeatedly during the campaign, but he hasn’t really spelled out what he’s going to do. He’s voiced sympathy for the people who were involved in January 6th, particularly who were there and did not participate in any of the violence. He’s also complained that a lot of them got long sentences, but again, he hasn’t said exactly what he is going to do. So everybody’s waiting to see what he will do. There is an expectation that he probably will issue some pardons. He has even said on the campaign trail that if elected, he would pardon them on day one. So we’re just waiting to see what happens.
Taylor Wilson:
Just in terms of January 6th, historically, Michael, how will this day be remembered really?
Michael Collins:
That’s a really interesting question, and I talked to some historians and posed that very question to them, and some of them said that they believe that in some ways Donald Trump’s reelection will change the way that many people view January 6th, one of them predicted that you’re going to see a lot of revisionist history. There’s always going to be a segment of Americans who view the January 6th riots as this attack on democracy and attempt by a losing candidate to overturn an election that he lost. But others, and we’re talking about Trump supporters primarily, see the January 6th rioters as patriots, and they think they were trying to stop and injustice such which was, in their view, the election being stolen from Donald Trump even though again, there was no evidence that that actually happened. One of the historians that I talked to said that in Trump’s view and in the view of many of his supporters, his victory in November validated many of his grievances about the 2020 election.
Taylor Wilson:
So Michael, what’s the expectation for today? I mean, will things go smoothly this time around.
Michael Collins:
This time things are expected to go smoothly. Nobody’s expecting a mob to show up outside the Capitol like they did four years ago, and one of the reasons for that is that Donald Trump won. He won the popular vote, he won the electoral college, he won, and nobody really disputes that. So this time, the process is expected to go smoothly. Four years ago, this vote count was actually something that very few people paid much attention to. If you were really into politics, you might’ve known that it was going to happen and you might’ve paid attention to it, but most Americans probably were not even aware that it happened. And I think that very well could be the case again this year as one of the lawmakers that we talked to said it’s probably going to be like it was before four years ago, which means it’s going to be a non-event.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, interesting stuff. Michael Collins is a White House correspondent with USA TODAY. Thanks for the insight, Michael.
Michael Collins:
Great, thank you very much.
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Taylor Wilson:
More than 60 million Americans were under winter weather and storm advisories yesterday as a swath of the Midwest and East braced for a historic storm after more than two feet of snow already fell in some areas since Friday. Governors in several states, including Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, declared states of emergency ahead of the weather system and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency for seven counties. The National Weather Service warned that some areas could see their biggest storm in more than a decade, and the weather service said daytime temperatures today and tomorrow are predicted to be 10 to 20 degrees below average from the Great Plains to the East Coast. You can stay with usatoday.com for all the latest.
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Is anyone deliberately tampering with our atmosphere? If so, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration want to know. I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent Elizabeth Weise for more. Beth, it’s always a treat. Thanks for having back on.
Elizabeth Weise:
Happy 2025.
Taylor Wilson:
Happy 2025. So let’s just get to this at the top. I mean, what are the scientists at NOAA working on here?
Elizabeth Weise:
It’s the Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder and basically they are using satellites and weather balloons to look at the stratosphere. So we live in the troposphere where there’s air and weather, stratosphere is the next level up. They’re basically looking for the first time to try and get a generalized idea of what’s going on up there.
Taylor Wilson:
So I mean, what is going on up there?
Elizabeth Weise:
Why do we care? Well, I mean there’s a lot of reasons to care about the stratosphere, but in this particular instance, the reason to care is that we have global warming. One way theoretically to lower temperatures, if we can’t just stop burning fossil fuel, or even if we did, it’s going to take a long time to cool down, would be to put particles up in the stratosphere, which would then reflect a tiny bit of the sun’s energy and thereby cooling the planet. And we know it works, at least theoretically because it’s exactly what big volcanoes do, huge volcanic eruptions. I mean, it’s got to be a big one like Pinatubo. They throw so much dust, it goes so high into the stratosphere that those little particles can hang out there for months or even years, and they do lower the earth’s temperature.
So what the scientists at NOAA are doing is threefold. First, they’re just trying to get the first baseline measurements for what’s up there, what does normal look like. And then, to see what natural events, like say a volcanic eruption or a really big wildfire, what effects do those have on the stratosphere? And then, the final part, and the kind of part we’re interested in today is, okay, so once they’ve got that information, they can start to look for, is anybody fooling around up there? Because we want to know if they are.
Taylor Wilson:
Beth, I have to admit, it strikes me as potentially a good idea, this concept of solar geoengineering, maybe a possible solution to a lot of the issues you and I talk about here on the show. Is that the case? I mean, what are some of the complications?
Elizabeth Weise:
The shorter answer is we don’t know. I mean, it might actually really work great. We have no idea. A volcanic explosion or an eruption is not a good test of how well this might work. And it’s enough of a concern that the American Geophysical Union actually met last month, and one of the things they did was put together kind of an ethical framework of how would you even think about this? Because yes, if you could do it at scale and scale is a big deal because we’re talking the whole planet so it could be really expensive, but then so is global warming. If you could do it, it could lower the temperature, which would be great as we’re trying to lower the amount of greenhouse gases. It would give us a little breathing room.
Everybody says it is not a get…
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