Letters to the Editor: Three years after Jan. 6, Trump has been normalized. How did this happen?

Police use pepper spray on rioters who were attempting to breach a barricade outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. ((Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times))

To the editor: Reporter Sarah D. Wire’s first-person account of the U.S. Capitol riot had me reliving the terror, disbelief and disgust that many Americans experienced on Jan. 6, 2021.

I say “many” because — impossible as it sounds — a large number of this country’s citizens do not believe what took place was an actual coup-driven attack on the seat of our nation’s democracy.

Meanwhile, a few pages away in a photo appearing in the same day’s newspaper, there he sits, the man responsible, as if he were a normal politician and candidate running for president.

It is beyond comprehension that people can continue to ignore or dispute the events of Jan. 6, let alone support an insurrectionist for office.

Maddie Gavel-Briggs, Pasadena

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To the editor: The riot on Capitol Hill took place three years ago, but I remember that fateful day like it was yesterday. That’s because in 1972, I had the honor of serving as a congressional staff assistant in the same building that Capitol Hill police valiantly were trying to protect.

Yes, I regularly walked the halls of Congress; and no, the Jan. 6 rioters were not just tourists, as one GOP lawmaker infamously described them.

I’m so thankful the rioters failed in their effort to prevent the counting of electoral college votes. Had they succeeded, who knows what our democracy would look like today?

Denny Freidenrich, Laguna Beach

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To the editor: I have often wondered how representatives who were nearly attacked in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, could then turn into deniers and supporters of the former president.

Wire’s retelling of the events showed me a psychological trajectory. To be physically there couldn’t have been more terrifying, as the assault was the opposite of the tradition, the order and the rules that define the place.

Faced with such assault, members became Hamlet, for whom “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Was this the terror, to meet one’s own cowardice?

One response to such trauma is denial. What better way to enact that denial than to get on board with the one who incited the violence?

Lynne Culp, Van Nuys

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.