The president-elect continues to evade responsibility for his denial of the election and his support for the January 6 uprising.
Donald Trump stands as a choir of men jailed for taking part in the January 6 uprising sing at a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, in March 2023.
(Evan Vucci/AP Photo)
Instantly rewriting history is an American specialty, as anyone familiar with Oliver North’s career or the run-up to the second US invasion of Iraq can readily attest. Yet, on the fourth anniversary of the deadly and illusory uprising in the US Capitol, we are poised to open an unprecedented chapter in the annals of our willful amnesia: a concerted effort to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election will not simply be remembered in a second Trump administration; it will be transformed into a noble civic enterprise.
This was always supposed to be the main ideological goal of the Republican Party under Trump, which has returned to power triumphantly: the forces of January 6th revisionism were already driving MAGA’s electoral strategy during the 2022 midterm elections, when the party fielded candidates who abandoned the election. the majority of the electorate. And after Trump announced his 2023 re-election bid, his first rally in Waco, Texas, featured a modified version of the national anthem called “And justice for all“, which is sung by the condemned participants of the coup attempt under the name “Choir J6”. (The song also features Trump himself reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, showing that he has no practical understanding of the phrase “the republic it stands for” or of the socialist origin of the pledge.)
During his campaign, Trump called the rebellion “day of love”-no doubt news to the seven people who died and another 150 injured in the attack, not to mention the hundreds of lawmakers evacuated under threat of violence. He has too promised to pardon a thousand rioters convicted on charges of attempted coup d’état, calling them “patriots”, “hostages” and “political prisoners”. This prospect stands out sharply against the background of the Trump White House’s plans to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants at the beginning of the new administration: MAGA’s violent and unconstitutional impunity should be rewarded and glorified, while the vast number of foreign-born workers will be stigmatized and disenfranchised to existence, homes and family ties.
Moreover, the Trump administration will target public figures who tried to prosecute the coup attempt. Trump has called to prison members of the special committee of the House of Representatives to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on January 6. Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Cash Patel, did just that supported the “federal rebellion” conspiracy theory.who baselessly claims that FBI agents instigated the failed coup to discredit the MAGA movement. (Patel too helped make the record release of the J6 Choir single “And Justice for All.”) The FBI under Patel is likely to be an avid aide to the Trump campaign for political retribution, especially since Patel also wants break up the intelligence part of the bureau from its law enforcement functions – a ploy that will greatly increase the influence of the White House on the activities of the bureau.
To draw attention to the concurrent threats of erasure of January 6 and the executive branch’s desire to prioritize political revenge, State Democracy Defenders Action, a bipartisan nonprofit group that focuses on issues of election sabotage and autocracy, held a press event ahead of the anniversary of January 6 and the convening of the 119th Congress . Tom Josselin, the Republican counterterrorism expert who was the lead author of the committee’s Jan. 6 final report, recalled Trump’s final weeks in office during his first term, a period during which he made false claims about election fraud and invited supporters to gather downtown authorities in Washington — as a reminder that he will restore the president’s powers as a strong figure courting unquestionable devotion. “Trump has already demonstrated that he will behave like an autocrat and that he will abuse executive authority,” Jocelyn said. “Not only does Trump demand service and loyalty, but he also demands this January 6 whitewashing and finding scapegoats and blaming others for it.”
Rep. Jamin Raskin, D-Maryland, who sat on the January 6 committee, emphasized that Trump’s promise of full pardons on January 6 would start his second term in a de facto constitutional crisis. “It would be an extraordinary event in the history of the republic if the president were to pardon more than a thousand convicts who were in prison for participating in an event initiated by this president,” Raskin said. He added that any follow-up action by the pardoned defendants on January 6, “politically or otherwise, will soon be on the doorstep of soon-to-be-president Donald Trump.” Raskin went on to point out that the broad nature of Trump’s pardon promise threatens, in the absence of close public scrutiny, to seriously undermine any clear sense of legal accountability. According to him, among the rioters “were people who disobeyed legal orders, and there were also people who used deadly violence against police officers. The media shouldn’t let President Trump get away with saying, “I’m going to pardon all these people,” as if there were procedural errors in all of these cases. This is perhaps the most well-documented crime in American history.”
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Of course, the mainstream press has already begun to normalize Trump’s entry into the White House, even as the new president steps up his fake war of revenge against the media. It’s hard to imagine how the billionaire-run media complex and its lack of revenue will hold Trump accountable on Jan. 6, especially given the court cases aimed at establishing that accountability. have largely stagnated after his re-election, and while cabinet nominees like Patel spread self-serving lies about the rebellion. (In a far unrelated development, 11 corporations and trade associations that condemned the attack on the capital are now making seven-figure donations to Trump’s lavish inauguration.)
In his final days in office, President Joe Biden on January 6 named committee members Benny Thompson and Liz Cheney among the 20 final recipients of the award. Civic Medal of the President in his administration is a typically dim attempt by Democrats to fend off Trump’s threat of committee prosecutions with a dose of ex officio prestige. But after Trump’s inauguration later this month, the whimsical counter-narrative about the events of Jan. 6 that has long gripped the Republican Party will become a mainstay for both federal law enforcement and MAGA policymaking. It is true that the crisis caused by Trump’s baroque and salacious denial of the election will be a stress test for constitutional governance in his second term, but it is also true that it arose in large part because our legal and political institutions failed to withstand critical stress- tests that preceded it. In short, for MAGA fans, the most important lesson of January 6 is that it worked.
