Donald Trump Wants You to Forget Jan 6 Happened

Donald Trump Wants You to Forget This Happened

January 6, five years later

By Jamie Thompson

United States District Court for the District of Columbia

January 6, 2026

Updated at 1:35 p.m. ET on January 12, 2026

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In the early-morning hours of January 5, 2021, Thomas Webster, a former U.S. Marine and retired police officer, drove south on Interstate 95 toward Washington, D.C. Webster, who was then 54, had been conflicted about whether to attend the “Save America” rally, but Donald Trump had used the word patriot. Webster had joined the military at 19, taken his first plane ride to boot camp in South Carolina, gotten his first taste of lobster tail on a ship in the Mediterranean. He loved the sense of purpose he’d drawn from the oath he’d sworn when he joined the Marines: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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Webster, who’d retired from the New York City Police Department, where he’d been a street cop, a firearms instructor, and part of the Gracie Mansion security detail, lived in Goshen, New York, with his wife, Michelle, an Ivy League graduate who worked in biotech sales, and their three teenagers, one of whom had recently joined the Marines. He ran a small business, Semper Fi Landscaping, cutting grass and clearing snow during winter.

In the early days of the pandemic, Webster had masked in public, disinfected his groceries, and slept in the basement if he had the slightest sniffle. At first he thought keeping his kids home from school made sense. But as the months stretched on, he worried about his two younger teenagers, who didn’t seem to be socializing or learning much over Zoom. One morning that spring, when Webster went outside to mow a neighbor’s lawn, he found himself troubled by the surreal silence on his block, like he was standing on a vacant movie set. 

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/jan-6-ex-nypd-officer-capitol-police-attack/685325/