Trump: The True All-American Messiah & The J6 Prison Choir
“Justice for All” is a recording of former U.S. President Trump and a group of men imprisoned for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. In the song, he recites the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, mixed with the J6 Prison Choir singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
According to CNN, and as reported by Variety, the J6 Prison Choir requested that Trump be part of the song.
He agreed and recorded his audio at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla.
Per Forbes, the prisoners recorded their vocals by phone and the track was “reportedly produced by a major recording artist who [has] not [been] identified.”
The single was released on Mailman Media March 3 and, per a source that spoke with Billboard, with a soft marketing rollout designed to gauge initial response before ramping up promotion.
The recording was promoted on streaming channel Real America’s Voice March 9, followed by its music video premiere on War Room with Steve Bannon.
Plus, Rumble and its affiliate company Locals hosted the video exclusively March 9 and 10.
Of the song’s digital sales in the tracking week, 39% occurred March 11.
The Paramilitary Candidate Trump has made justice for insurrectionists the center of his campaign.
By Jonathan Chait, who’s been a New York political columnist since 2011.
Paying tribute to a choir of jailed January 6 participants. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
At a recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump stood at formal attention while an announcer instructed the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” As Trump saluted, the speakers played a version of the national anthem sung by imprisoned insurrectionists.
“They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that, and everybody knows that,” Trump said at the outset of his speech. “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”
Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign.
The J6 version of the national anthem has been playing at rallies since March 2023, and Trump has been referring to jailed insurrectionists as “hostages” since November.
But the prospect of pardoning them, which he has floated for two years, has in recent days been made his highest priority.
Trump’s promise to “save the country,” which before encompassed his array of domestic and international policies, now refers principally to vindicating the militia that tried to illegally install him in power and that more and more has come to resemble a classic paramilitary group in the Trump imaginarium, licensed to carry out extrajudicial violence on his authority alone.
. . .But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters.
He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term.
Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday.
Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.
Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent.
McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won.
All her genuflections were not enough.
This is also why Trump is reportedly bringing back Paul Manafort, who served a prison sentence for bank and tax fraud, and witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and whose business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, was assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence.
Manafort’s skills are hardly irreplaceable.
The point of bringing him back, other than the familiar mob logic of rewarding an underling who took his pinch like a man and refused to rat out the boss, is to signal that loyalty to Trump matters more than any other possible consideration.
Normal politicians would distance themselves from staffers who committed crimes, especially crimes on their behalf. Trump regards this as the highest qualification.
. . .Among the true-believing Trumpists, there’s no confusion about what Trump’s relentless demands of cultlike submission are trying to accomplish.
“The Judas Iscariots of the American Right need to understand that their betrayal comes at a cost,” rails a recent column in American Greatness, one of the new pseudointellectual organs that have sprung up in the Trump era to meet conservative audience demand for sycophantic content.
“Excommunication is not enough. Their treachery deserves relentless psychic pain.”
It adds that Mike Pence, the New York Times columnist David French, and others “should never be allowed back into respectable conservative company under any circumstances.”
Measured in traditional political terms, January 6 martyrdom may be a disadvantageous message for Trump.
The stolen-election lie polls terribly with persuadable voters, and his fixation with it is one reason why Biden’s catastrophic approval ratings have resulted in only a small Trump lead.
But by Trumpian logic, it is the perfect campaign theme.
It forces his internal critics to swallow their last objection against him.
It sends a message to his allies that they can act with impunity.
By November, the J6 national anthem will be burned into our brains as deeply as any campaign jingle.
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