Jan. 6: Ultimately a success?

Pro-Trump rioters clash with police in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021

‘Peaceful, patriotic protesters’ assaulting police on Jan. 6, 2021

(Image credit: Mostafa Bassim / Andaolu Agency / Getty Images)

There’s a new official narrative about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, said Cameron Peters in Vox, and “it’s bonkers.” On the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the White House’s website debuted a new section telling a story completely at odds with reality. Instead of a coup attempt egged on by Donald Trump, we learn that it was a gathering of “peaceful, patriotic protesters” righteously upset by a “stolen” election. The real villains were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Capitol Police, and Vice President Mike Pence, whose certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win is described as an act of “cowardice and sabotage.” The Democrats supposedly “staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election,” and Trump “took decisive action” in pardoning roughly 1,500 rioters last January, even though hundreds were convicted of crimes against police. This marks Trump’s “most comprehensive effort” yet at trying to make his twisted version of Jan. 6 the historical record.

It’s bad enough that Trump keeps lying about that day, said Noah Rothman in National Review. But it’s “downright obscene” to use taxpayer money to promote a “tinfoil hat” narrative “so brazen in its contempt for the established record that it would have made a Soviet propagandist blush.” Pence’s certification of the Electoral College results thwarted Trump on Jan. 6, said Aidan McLaughlin in Vanity Fair. But thanks to Trump’s years-long whitewashing efforts, which he now can promote as president of the United States, “the rioters more or less won.”

As proof of that, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark, consider MAGA’s canonization of Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt. The Air Force veteran and QAnon conspiracy theorist was killed when she defied police commands and tried to break into the Capitol through a broken window as a violent mob surged behind her. MAGA has declared her a martyr, and Trump even awarded her family $5 million in damages. By contrast, his administration and its supporters are insisting that Minneapolis protester Renee Good deserved to be killed for interfering with an ICE operation. In
Trumpism, violence is legal and even heroic when directed against migrants, lefty protesters, and anyone he and his followers hate. The law exists only for “the domination of their enemies”—which include “about half of America.” There’s a name for that form of government. “It is fascism.”