Trump Compares Jan. 6 Insurrectionists To WWII-Era Japanese American Incarcerees

Former President Donald Trump once again claimed Friday that his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were being treated unfairly by the federal justice system.

But this time, he offered a deeply flawed historical analogy: Trump claimed the insurrectionists are being treated like Japanese Americans during World War II who were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in isolated regions of the country.

“Why are they still being held?” Trump asked during an appearance on right-wing pundit Dan Bongino’s show on Rumble, a far-right video platform.

“Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly, they were held, too,” Trump said.

Unlike the Jan. 6 defendants, the Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II were not charged with any crimes. Rather, they were held under the guise of national security after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans in the camps — barebones and squalid, filled with the very young and very old alike — eventually led Congress and President Ronald Reagan to issue an apology and $20,000 reparation check to each surviving person who was unjustly imprisoned.

In sharp contrast, the Trump supporters who have been arrested for participating in the deadly Jan. 6 riot nearly four years ago have all been charged with crimes. Some are violent crimes, including assaults on law enforcement officers, and a few have even been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Trump also voiced two provably false claims in his Bongino interview, saying “nobody was killed” during the insurrection and that “there were no guns involved.”

Several people died in the crowd during the riot, and one Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by Secret Service personnel. Just this week, unsealed court records revealed how a Texas man and his accomplices snuck firearms into Washington, D.C., and even brought one onto Capitol grounds. A man accused of firing a gun in the air during the riot was also arrested back in March.

Trump claimed that his supporters “really won in the Supreme Court” with its July decision in Fischer v. United States, a case that challenged the use of an obstruction statute applied against several Jan. 6 defendants who allegedly tried to block Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results.

The court indeed ruled in favor of the Jan. 6 defendants, leading the Department of Justice to drop the obstruction charge in some cases.

But more than 1,200 people have been charged in connection with the riot. Some people are still being held in jail while they await trial on other charges, while others have been handed sentences and are serving them out. Still others have already served their time and been released.