The Normalizing

Semaphore tower, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The Semafor story ("How Donald Trump learned to love the January 6 prisoner movement") about the lengthy evolution of Trump's views on the January 6 insurgents—

A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.

—is the most classic example I've seen in a long time of the Trump "normalization" narrative, portraying the ex-president as a deliberative thinker, carefully considering how to respond to a problem, right from the lede

On January 7, 2021, as shell-shocked staffers swept up the Capitol and National Guard troops patrolled the Mall, President Donald Trump released a video denouncing the “heinous attack on the United States Capitol.” He declared himself “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” and promised “to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

As if he'd had anything in particular to do even with writing the text for that video, which he read aloud in his most dead-voiced, resentful fourth-grader manner, making one of his typical reading-disability errors (because the phrase "in so doing" is a little too fancy for him),

MY ONLY GOAL WAS TO ENSURE THE INTEGRITY OF THE VOTE. IN SO DUTY -- DOING I WAS FIGHTING TO DEFEND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.

according to the closed captions that ran with the video—that seems to have been doctored out of the audio at some point, but it's still there in the captions—also restoring the missing word, "lawlessness" which marks the text as probably written by Stephen Miller, who loves those sequences of three synonyms ("violence, lawlessness and mayhem") as well as Wagnerian alliterations ("SACRED BONDS OF LOVE AND LOYALTY THAT BIND US TOGETHER"),

I AM OUTRAGED BY THE VIOLENCE AND MAYHEM. I IMMEDIATELY DEPLOYED THE NATIONAL GUARD AND FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT TO SECURE THE BUILDING AND EXPEL THE INTRUDERS.

That last sentence is of course a lie, as we've not known for certain since the testimony from the House Select Committee in June 2022

Despite [staff] guidance, Trump did not tell the rioters to leave the Capitol, and the president did not “call … any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended.” Specifically, [Rep. Liz] Cheney noted, Trump did not call the secretary of defense, and he did not speak to the acting attorney general or the Department of Homeland Security. Trump also did not order the deployment of the National Guard, and he did not attempt to work with the Justice Department to deploy law enforcement personnel. Cheney noted that Trump said to his staff that his supporters “were doing what they should be doing.” 

and we can assume that it was there, along with the whole video, to forestall the move in the House to impeach him for the second time, which the Washington Post reported on January 8.

It's ridiculous to treat the video as evidence of anything Trump might have been thinking about the insurrectionists, as opposed to what he's always thinking about, which is Trump, and how to get out of the mess he's currently in at any given moment.

But once he was home in Florida and the impeachment was over, his next utterances in an interview with the Washington Post, March 2021, are a first draft of the picture he's been broadcasting ever since:

“It was a loving crowd, too, by the way,” he said of the crowd at his speech, many of whom then walked to the Capitol. He described the subsequent actions as “too bad.”

“They were ushered in by the police,” he then claimed. “I mean, in all fairness — the Capitol Police were ushering people in. The Capitol Police were very friendly. You know, they were hugging and kissing.”

“Personally,” he later added, “what I wanted is what they wanted. They showed up just to show support” for his false claims about election fraud.

He was proclaiming their innocence before any of them went on trial, in July 2021 (same Post story):

“I say though, however, people are being treated unbelievably unfairly,” he continued. “When you look at people in prison and nothing happens to antifa and they burned down cities and killed people. There were no guns in the Capitol except for the gun that shot Ashli Babbitt.”

And he started offering to pardon them in January 2022, a full year before he announced his 2024 candidacy:

“Another thing we’ll do — and so many people have been asking me about it — if I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” the former president said. “We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

A lot of these things are quoted in the Semafor piece, but in a way that leaves the timeline fuzzy. They aren't the way the Semafor reporters tell the story they led with, anyway; that's done through interviews with a handful of people, including Joanna Wischer Miller (a Senior Policy Analyst in the Trump White House who moved to the Save America PAC), Cynthia Hughes (an Aunt For Liberty, you might say, who founded the Patriot Freedom Project after her nephew Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, an army reservist busted for his January 6 activities on January 17, was denied bail because his history of racist, antisemitic, and pro-Hitler remarks on the naval base where he worked made him sound too dangerous to the Trump-appointed judge), and Julie Kelly (a former Chicago political operative who is now a stay-at-home mom, cooking teacher and food writer, contributor to American Greatness, and author of at least one book, January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right), boasting about how important they are to Trump, starting in August 2022,  when Hughes and Kelly were summoned to the Trump summer court in Bedminster:

“Up until that point, he really wasn’t aware of what was happening with these individuals,” Kelly told Semafor. “His team wasn’t really aware, so that was the purpose of the briefing in August of 2022. I had been contacted by one of his associates a few months before that wanting to know what they could do to help.”

Kelly said she sensed “a heightened interest” around this time from Trump and his orbit — and she gave Trump a blunt assessment of the situation: His judicial picks trying the January 6 cases, she told him, “were among the worst on the bench,” and family members and defendants remained disappointed “that he had been really silent up until that point.”

The appeal from Kelly and Hughes had an immediate impact on the former president. After the meeting, Trump shifted to more organized action, a second Trump aide said, with the help of Joanna Miller Wischer, a senior advisor at his Save America PAC, who had already been unofficially working with January 6 advocates. She had worked as a Trump White House policy aide, and was cited by one January 6 family member as a key liaison to Trumpworld.

So nothing. They didn't persuade him to do something he'd decided to do eight months before he met them They're just giving Semafor a "scoop" to enhance their griftability. Maybe they thought of the idiotic expedient of referring to the prisoners as "hostages", but I doubt it. (Maybe that was Elise Stefanik, who started deploying it the same weekend he did—all I know is it was so stupid she almost got herself censured, while Trump did not). But the story makes it look as if Trump spends a lot of time thinking, judiciously weighing the alternatives, and that's just another big lie.