When Gregory Thayer boarded a bus headed south from Vermont to Washington, D.C., on the night of Jan. 5, 2021, he had the goal of “being a part of history,” he later said.
Thayer, now a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Vermont, arrived in the nation’s capital early the following morning, hours before Congress was scheduled to certify the 2020 election results.
Former Vice President Joe Biden had defeated then-President Donald Trump, but Thayer believed Trump’s discredited claims that the election was stolen. “I do believe that there were certain things that happened around the country in different states with voting laws that made it easier for, you know, various things to happen — mainly the mail-in ballot process,” he told VTDigger in an interview this week.
Thayer traveled to D.C., he said, because he “felt there was a constitutional right to disallow some states’ delegates” and he “just wanted to go down and be part of that process.”
“I saw a lot of great American people — patriots from all over the country,” Thayer said of his experience that day. “I talked to people from all over the country. I was happy and proud to be there.”
Thayer’s opponent in the GOP primary for lieutenant governor is state Sen. Joe Benning, R-Caledonia, a Statehouse veteran who has carved out a reputation as a moderate Republican and Trump critic. For the two candidates, Jan. 6 has become an ideological Rorschach test.
“That’s the battle right now — between those who believe protesters who went up the Capitol steps were engaging in legitimate political discourse, or whether that fits the definition of an insurrection,” Benning said. “In my eyes, my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary very plainly spells out that that was an insurrection.”
Outside the Capitol
Thayer was one of thousands to heed Trump’s call to march to the U.S. Capitol as Congress attempted to orchestrate a peaceful transfer of power.
“We fight like hell,” Trump said in a speech to supporters that day. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Thayer said he made it as far as the Capitol grounds, where he said he prayed over an injured man who eventually died, and watched as another demonstrator fell from a pillar. At the same time, he saw demonstrators confront Capitol Police, yelling, as he put it, “Let us in our effing house!”
He was not able to provide evidence of those events, saying he no longer had the phone he had carried with him that day.
Thayer said he never entered the building, and left to catch the bus back to Vermont around 2:50 p.m.
According to NPR’s timeline of events that day, demonstrators broke windows and climbed into the Capitol shortly after 2 p.m. By 2:20 p.m., the House and Senate recessed and the building went into lockdown.
In the year since the deadly attack, hundreds of participants have been arrested and charged with crimes, including one Vermonter. A select committee of the U.S. House is conducting an ongoing investigation of the day and the events leading to it.
Thayer told VTDigger that he “condemn(s) what went on inside the Capitol,” but that he thinks “there was just a couple of bad eggs and you know, they exhibited some bad behavior.” He also gives oxygen to the unsubstantiated claim that the protest was “infiltrated” by “the far left.”
Ten days after the riot, Thayer in a tweet denied the notion that Trump incited the day’s violence, saying, “I know, I was there!”
‘Legitimate political discourse’
Last week, the Republican National Committee made headlines when it voted during its winter meeting in Salt Lake City on a measure that, among other things, dubbed the Jan. 6 attack and related events as “legitimate political discourse.”
Paul Dame, the chair of the Vermont Republican Party, told VTDigger that he, along with the Vermont GOP’s national committeeman, Jay Shepard, left the meeting early, before the voice vote was taken, in order to catch a flight.
Dame said there were certain portions of the resolution he favored and others he did not, such as the condemnation of Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Pressed on how he would have voted, he said that if he unsure about a question he probably would not vote for it.
Of those who went to D.C. and didn’t engage in violence or pass police barricades, Dame said, “I think that is legitimate.”
“I think anybody who went beyond those guardrails … is no longer under what I would consider protected free speech,” he said. “But there’s a lot of people who went there just to hear Trump speak, and they got back into their cars and they went home. And that’s appropriate. The folks who decided, regardless of how involved they got, decided to take it further than that need to be held accountable.”
Asked if he knew that Thayer had gone to the Capitol on Jan. 6, Dame answered, “I don’t think I knew that as a fact, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Maybe I had assumed that.”
A ‘wedge’ in the Republican Party
According to Benning, the debate over the legitimacy of Jan. 6 epitomizes the inner turmoil plaguing the Republican Party. Within Vermont, he said, there are two factions: “The Phil Scott camp and the Donald Trump camp.”
“In order for the party to move on, get the public interested in its pillars of strength, we have to get away from the election of 2020. We have to move forward,” Benning said. “We can’t continue as a divided party…. The trick for Republicans is, how do we unify both camps?”
Right now, he said, the core principles of the Republican Party “get lost in the conversation” over Jan. 6, or the persistent (and unsubstantiated) doubt around the legitimacy of the 2020 election. “There’s no question,” he said, that the election was valid, and yet he is still bombarded with conspiracy theory-riddled emails about Italian military satellites messing with voting machines in his district.
“If the Republican Party has any chance of success at presenting itself to the Vermont demographic, we have got to get away from the things that are currently driving a wedge between us and concentrate on what it is we have in common moving forward,” he said.
As for Thayer, he said he no longer believes that Trump should be installed as president. “Well, under our constitutional law, yes, (Biden) is the president,” he said. “I mean, should we go backwards today, even if these states were overturned? No, I think you know, it’s too deep into it.”
Asked in retrospect if he is happy with his decision to participate on Jan. 6, Thayer said, “Yeah, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“A great day turned into a bad day because of a few and then, unfortunately, many others fell in and did some bad behaviors,” he said.
Clarification: This story has been updated to more precisely describe how Vermont GOP chair Paul Dame would have voted on a resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee.