Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump and his allies reshaping the history of Jan. 6

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Now that Congress has formally certified the results of the presidential election, a path is officially paved for president-elect Trump to take office later this month.

  For more, we turn now to our Politics Monday duo. That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  Great to see you both.

  So, Tam, as you saw Lisa reporting earlier, we had the certification of those 2024 election results passing without incident today. Four years later, a dramatically different scene unfolded on Capitol Hill. When you look at recent polling from The Economist, though, it shows that less than half of all Americans, some 49 percent, say they believe that Mr. Trump bears some or a lot of responsibility for that January 6 attack.

  That includes, in terms of a partisan breakdown, 83 percent of Democrats, 17 percent of Republicans. Do you feel like Mr. Trump and Republicans have sort of successfully recast that day and rewritten political history?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Yes, and a lot of these questions, the answers that people give in polls is often just a reflection of their views on Trump, no matter what the question is.

  I don't know if that's the case here, but it certainly could be, because views of January 6 have begun closely tracking with views of Trump. That is, he says it was a day of love. He says it wasn't a big deal. He also has said that he is going to pardon some share of the people who stormed the Capitol that day and have pled guilty or been convicted of crimes.

  We don't — it isn't clear yet whether it will be truly considered on a case-by-case basis or whether these will be blanket pardons. But he and Republicans, since the very beginning, since just within days, began rewriting history, began describing it as a tourist visit.

  And, initially, that sounded absurd to almost everyone, but over time, Trump and his allies have sort of reshaped the Republican Party's view of this. They haven't really reshaped the Democratic Party's view of it. And there are certainly, as Lisa reported, Republicans in Congress who were there that day who have much more complex feelings.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, Amy, Tam mentioned those potential pardons from president-elect Trump. In that same Economist poll, I should point out, some 33 percent of Americans, including 63 percent of Republicans, support pardons for people convicted of crimes related to January 6.

  I mean, when you step back and look at this day in the context of what happened four day — four years ago, rather, how do you look at this moment?

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  Yes, I do think that if you think back to where we were back in January of 2001, the possibility of Donald Trump coming back into the White House seemed more than remote.

  But I think there are three big things that happened. The first is just the passage of time. For some of us, four years ago doesn't feel that long ago. I think for many four years ago was actually a pretty significant amount of time. So it fell out of the day-to-day conversation.

  The second is the thing that Tam was talking about. We have a partisan and fractured media environment in which you get fed views that align with your own personal feelings, whether it's about Donald Trump or other issues.

  And I also think that we had the fact that the president wasn't prosecuted. The former president was never prosecuted for this. There was not a case brought against him. So all of those things together, I think, helped to put this issue more on the back burner in the 2024 election than we thought it would be in 2021.

  At the same time, I think it would be very dangerous for Republicans or for President Trump to assume that voters don't think that these actions were problematic, that they support the pardoning. As you pointed out, only 33 percent really overall support pardoning these January 6 defendants, and that many voters went into the voting booth holding two thoughts at one time.

  One, they really did not like Trump's actions in the January 6 events. And at the same time, they really did think he was going to do a better job for them as president on their most salient issue. And for many of them, it was the economy.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Well, Tam, this is the context in which lawmakers now step in to do their jobs, right? And Republicans have a governing trifecta now. They have chosen their leader in the Senate, in Senator John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson.

  And we know there's been some questions about how Mr. Trump and the Republicans will move forward with a very broad and aggressive policy agenda that they have, everything from the border crackdown to energy policy and tax cuts. Mr. Trump himself weighed in on what seems to be a suggestion of what he'd like to see in the way they move forward with a Hugh Hewitt interview earlier today.

  Take a listen.

  Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. President-Elect: I favor one bill. I also want to get everything passed. And there are some people that don't necessarily agree with it, some open to that also. My preference is one big, as I say, one big, beautiful bill.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Do you see Republicans moving forward with one big bill with all of these policy items?

• Tamara Keith:

  You know, it's a good question. I think it is a matter of debate that is being debated right now among Republicans. Trump, as you say, both in that Hugh Hewitt interview and in a social media, post said he wanted one big, beautiful bill.

  One big, beautiful bill is really hard to do when you have an extremely narrow margin. And that is especially the case in the House of Representatives, where Republicans just have such a narrow margin. We saw that with the election of Speaker Johnson that was as narrow as you can get.

  And Republicans have struggled with big budgetary bills that do a lot of things. This is a particular area of struggle for Republicans for the last several years.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Yes.

• Tamara Keith:

  They have had to rely on Democratic votes alone. It's not clear that just having Republicans alone in power is going to be enough to get them past all of these issues, which is why just doing immigration or just doing immigration and oil drilling together and saving the tax bill for later, some Senate Republicans especially think that might be more plausible.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Amy, what do you make of that?

• Amy Walter:

  Right, yes, get the W on the board as early as possible with an immigration and energy policy bill, which is going to be easier to get all Republicans on board, even in the House, where they have such a narrow majority.

  The danger with that, though, is that you get one thing done, but you drag out the tax bill and other things further and further into the year. And, as we know, they have got a lot of other difficult votes to take before we even get to the summer.

  We still have to fund the government in March. There's going to be a debt ceiling bill. And then there are the things that we don't know are going to happen that will take both energy and time and potentially the president's capital. So the theory of one big bill is, there's so much in there that everybody gets something.

  There's something, a little something for everybody. One thing I will note historically, regardless of the size of their majorities, presidents in their first term have been able to get one big piece of legislation done on party-line-only votes. So Trump got his tax bill in 2017. We will see if he can get it again in 2021.

• Amna Nawaz:

  We will see indeed.

  Amy Walter and Tamara Keith, always great to see you both. Thank you so much.

• Amy Walter:

  Thank you.