With Trump moving
closer to renomination, rewriting Jan. 6 attack gains urgency
Analysis
by Philip Bump
National
columnist
November 27, 2023 at 11:58
a.m. EST
There is no mystery about
the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what
occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.
But because everything about what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, implicates the
cultural leader of the Republican Party — and because pretending that a mystery
exists benefits him — we approach the third anniversary of
that day with renewed efforts to rewrite its history.
Donald Trump lost
the 2020 presidential election and very obviously refused to accept it. Any
questions about the legitimacy of the vote — stoked by Trump for years —
evaporated within weeks, if not days. Many of his allies shifted to vague
arguments about how the system was working against him. But
Trump didn’t. He argued that there was fraud covered up by Trump haters and,
with increasing desperation, demanded that his supporters in Washington and
elsewhere rise to his defense.
A few hours after a heated Oval Office argument in which
his team tried to figure out how to retain power, he shared a post on social
media calling for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6. The day’s
protest, he promised, would “be wild.” This message itself comes up repeatedly when
looking at the triggers for participants to be at the Capitol on that day.
Thousands came. Trump, still trying to figure out how to
block the certification of Joe Biden’s election,
gave a speech to the crowd making more false claims about fraud, including
debunked ones, and encouraged people to march to the Capitol. They did. There
was a riot. People died. Scores of police officers were assaulted. A few hours
later, Trump’s loss was formalized.
In short, the day’s violence was carried out by Trump
supporters and supporters of Trump’s politics. They were there not only because
Trump specified that day and place as the location of a “protest” but because
he’d relentlessly argued that a protest was needed. The intent was explicitly
to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That Trump used the word
“peacefully” once in his speech is no more exculpatory than the fact that
thousands of Trump supporters weren’t violent and didn’t enter the Capitol. There
was violence and there were violent actors; they were there because Trump
refused to accept that voters had rejected him.
There was a point at which this might have understandably
seemed like the coda to Trump’s tenure in politics. Trump lost the election and
then stoked a violent response to the transfer of power. History books, if not
Hollywood, suggest an epilogue in which he spends his remaining years exiled to
the wilderness.
But he was never exiled. Less than two weeks after
Trump’s departure from Washington, the leader of the House Republican
conference, seeking to solidify his own power, paid the former president a
sycophantic visit. Since 2015, Republicans had figured out that even valid
criticisms of Trump could be pivoted to his and their advantage, and the riot
was no different. So they did and, 1,000 days after the riot, Trump found
himself the clear front-runner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination.
This adds new urgency to efforts by Trump’s allies to
neutralize his response to the 2020 election as a political issue. Trump’s
opponents, including President Biden, have focused on Trump’s rejection of the
election results — on his efforts to sideline democracy — as a central reason
to oppose him in 2024. There’s evidence that many
voters view 2024 through this lens. While many of the right’s defenses of Trump
center on the short-term rewards of allying with his rhetoric, some of them are
obviously more tactical.
These defenses take a number of forms.
The most deluded centers on the idea that the riot was not
actually a function of Trump supporters or a desire to see Trump retain power.
Two alternative culprits are generally proposed: federal agents or left-wing
actors.
The latter idea was voiced immediately after the
riot and was quickly debunked. But it lingers: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
(R-Ga.), who’s selling a book, told Donald Trump
Jr. on a recent podcast that “nobody could tell me that those were Trump
supporters” and that she believes “they were antifa — [Black Lives Matter]
rioters.”
There’s no evidence of this at all. In fact, it defies any
logic. For Greene, though, this is a long-held argument. During the riot
itself, she texted White House
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to tell him that she and others “think they are
Antifa … [d]ressed like Trump supporters.” Of course, that was about 90 minutes
after she’d texted Meadows to exhort him to “[p]lease tell the President to
calm people[.] This isn’t the way to solve anything.”
Greene’s response to Jan. 6 has been nearly as fungible and
opportunistic as Trump’s. The rioters were antifa — except that those being
held for committing acts of violence are also political prisoners being
targeted for their Trump support by a nefarious Joe Biden.
This argument depends on a useful glossing over of what detainees actually did.
Many of those who are in prison agreed to plea deals — which is to say they
admitted guilt. Others were convicted of assaults on police officers. Others
still were members of groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers who
actively planned to disrupt the transition of power or to aid Trump in doing
so. Lumping them all together as victims of a punitive state makes it much
easier to ignore what they actually did.
It also makes it easier to cast Trump himself as the target
of Deep State hostility. This has been his line for years, of course, but it
gained new heft after the multiple indictments obtained against him this year.
Many Trump supporters think he’s being unfairly targeted by leftist
prosecutors; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that this extends back to the
weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. There’s no more evidence (much less logical reason)
to support the idea that federal agents triggered the riot than there is to
believe antifa did it. But every time someone is incorrectly identified as a
federal agent or just asks questions about
it, new space is introduced for Trump to argue that this is all meant to impede
his power.
Elevation of doubt is at the heart of so much of this. You
don’t need to know precisely what federal agent provocateur made Jan. 6 happen,
but if you’re open to the idea that perhaps one did, you’re probably less
compelled by arguments that Trump posed or poses a threat to democracy. If you
are convinced that the House select committee investigating the riot was trying
to take down Trump, it becomes easier to wave away the evidence presented that
showed Trump’s culpability. And then, by extension, shrug at the similar or
overlapping evidence from special counsel Jack Smith.
Elevation of doubt, in fact, offers its own political
rewards. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently announced that he would make
available thousands of hours of security footage from the Capitol on that day —
footage that has already been used to
suggest both that nefarious, non-Trump actors were involved and that the day’s
violence was overstated, given that much of the footage shows nothing but empty
corridors. Cameras in the aft section of the Titanic would have shown tranquil
scenes, too, until they were submerged.
Republican voices in opposition to reframing the aftermath
of the 2020 election are becoming more scarce.
“Everyone who makes the argument that January 6 was an
unguided tour of the Capitol is lying to America,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said
on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Everyone who
says that the prisoners who are being prosecuted right now for their
involvement in January 6, that they are somehow political prisoners or that
they didn’t commit crimes, those folks are lying to America.”
Buck may feel more free to say these true things because he
announced that he would not seek reelection. Former Wyoming representative Liz
Cheney (R) was free to challenge Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-Utah) misinformation about
Capitol security footage because she no longer needs to appeal to Republican
voters. Lee does.
No one is happier to elevate doubt about the Capitol riot
than Trump, of course. He’s floated pardoning those involved in the violence,
reinforcing the idea that they — like him, of course! — are being unfairly
targeted. He’s argued that the day’s events were not his fault and attacked
critics who suggest otherwise.
Put another way: What Trump is doing now, 340-odd days
before the 2024 general election, is amplifying self-serving falsehoods and
finding a hungry audience for them. This is also precisely what he was doing in
the weeks before the Capitol riot.
