Four years ago, Officer Daniel Hodges was called upon to defend the Capitol against a pro-Trump mob and wound up being pinned by the throng in a doorway of the building, in one of the most searing images of the violence that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Monday, Officer Hodges is expected to be on duty again — this time with a different job: ensuring that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inauguration goes off safely.
In an interview with The New York Times, Officer Hodges said he had come to grips with the idea that his professional duty now required him to protect a man whose supporters beat him, kicked him and tried to gouge his eyes out on Jan. 6.
“It’s something I knew would happen since Nov. 5, so I’ve had a lot of time to deal with it,” he said. “But that’s the thing about democracy — you can’t just be in favor of it when your guy wins. You have to be OK with it when the other guy wins.”
Officer Hodges, who has served for a decade in the Metropolitan Police Department, was thrust into the public spotlight a little more than six months after Jan. 6 when he was one of four officers injured during the Capitol attack to testify at the first public hearing of the House select committee that investigated the riot.
During his testimony, he described how the mob descended into “terrorism” that day, booing and mocking the police as rioters hoisted Trump flags. And he watched the videos of himself, showing him trying to escape being crushed by the crowd in a doorway of the Lower West Terrace tunnel, his helmet askew, his face contorted in pain.
“To my perpetual confusion, I saw the thin-blue-line flag — the symbol of support for law enforcement — more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us,” he said.
Officer Hodges still works for the same civil disturbance unit he was part of on Jan. 6 and has been assigned to protect Mr. Trump’s inauguration — although he said he did not know yet exactly where he would be posted.
He is the only one of the four officers who appeared before the committee who remains on the police force. The others — Harry Dunn, Michael Fanone and Aquilino Gonell — have all gone on to different jobs.
While he said his day-to-day work life had more or less returned to normal, Officer Hodges acknowledged feeling angry about Mr. Trump’s repeated promises to pardon hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, perhaps even those who are now serving prison time for assaulting him and other officers.
“Personally, it’s a slap in the face to myself and my colleagues who put ourselves on the line to defend the vice president and Congress and the transfer of power and effectively democracy,” he said.
“But more than that,” he added, “it would be emboldening to future actions of violence against the United States, and it would encourage people to commit crimes to benefit the president of the United States.”
