The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl said, “History is an argument without end.” Not always. Many big historical questions are firmly settled. No one seriously suggests that the Watergate break-in was justified, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene retracted her claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
At first, the same consensus seemed to apply to Jan. 6, 2021. “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” Donald Trump said the day after the riot he inspired. Mr. Trump appeared to have crossed out the line in his statement addressed to the rioters: “You do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.” Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to say that. But he did say that they did not represent the country, and the guilt of those who ransacked the Capitol hardly seemed ripe for revision.
Of course it didn’t take long for Mr. Trump to move from condemning the rioters to celebrating them. And with his victory in November, the narrative of the most serious threat to the American Republic since the Civil War is suddenly up for grabs.
For Mr. Trump, the new struggle over Jan. 6 is a chance to rewrite not just the most irresponsible moment of his irresponsible life, but American history itself.
For his critics, Jan. 6 has become an excruciating anniversary — a reminder of how much constitutional muscle we lost that day, and how much more could wither in the next four years. Back then, many of us comforted ourselves that for all the trauma, at least Mr. Trump was gone for good. Now he’s back, his election to be certified a second time on the same date in the same chamber desecrated by his insurrectionists.
With Jack Smith’s criminal prosecution dead and the investigative committees of Congress in friendly hands, Mr. Trump has an opening to erase the black mark of Jan. 6 on the MAGA movement. He has already begun to gaslight Americans over whom to blame. Believers in the rule of law and the sovereignty of fact will have to paint over the whitewash with truth. It won’t be easy.
Until 2021, Jan. 6 was not a significant day on the American calendar. From 1892 to 1996, the winner of the popular vote also won the Electoral College, which meant that the vice president opening the certificates of the electoral votes was a vestigial ritual that rarely made the front page.
It did on Jan. 6, 1961, when Vice President Richard Nixon, who lost by a hair to John F. Kennedy, announced J.F.K.’s election from the rostrum. Forty years later, Vice President Al Gore, who beat George W. Bush in the 2000 popular vote, announced Mr. Bush’s Electoral College victory, after Mr. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. And on Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris will put on the same wan smile employed by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Gore and announce that Mr. Trump won the election.
Mr. Nixon called the Jan. 6 declaration of an opponent’s victory “a striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system.”
Now Jan. 6 is more like a striking and alarming example of the fragility of our constitutional system.
The 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act has made it harder for the vice president and state legislatures to overturn elections. But the frightening lesson of Jan. 6 remains: If the president is determined to sabotage our system, he (or she) can get away with it. And if the voters don’t care — as most did not in 2024 — the saboteur in chief can be returned to high office.
Jan. 6 is at the center of what historians will probably view as a tragic set of missed opportunities. The House Jan. 6 committee did a terrific job of illuminating what happened and how Mr. Trump could be called to account. But Merrick Garland’s Justice Department dawdled too long in 2021 and 2022 and the derelict Supreme Court ran out the clock.
Mr. Trump now claims that “nothing” wrong was done that day, except by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. “Nothing” is a good word to associate with him about Jan. 6. That’s what he did for 187 minutes while the Constitution he took an oath to defend came under attack. He was too busy watching TV.
Mr. Trump’s choice for F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has raised money for families of the Jan. 6 prisoners and peddled outlandish conspiracy theories claiming that undercover F.B.I. agents instigated the riot to discredit the MAGA movement. Mr. Patel, under questioning from Democrats at his confirmation hearings, will have to decide whether Jan. 6 was a wonderful “free speech movement,” as he called it, or an F.B.I.-inspired riot. He can’t have it both ways. If the latter, will he support pardoning the dastardly F.B.I. agents he has promised to fire?
The rioters Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon could include those convicted of attacking 140 police officers, many of whom were seriously injured. This leaves MAGA supporters who claim to support vigorous law enforcement twisting themselves into a pretzel of hypocrisy. They “back the blue” — unless it’s a coup.
Fortunately, polls show that roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose Mr. Trump’s plan to pardon the insurrectionists. Even many Trump voters didn’t like what happened that day. But the new president’s relentless salesmanship of his exculpatory narrative could fuzz up the issue. The bully pulpit is a good place to bully critics and flush the memory of a Confederate flag near the Rotunda and a noose for Mike Pence on the lawn.
And he will have plenty of help. It’s easy to forget how much support Mr. Trump still had on the night of Jan. 6 from members who just a few hours earlier were cowering in fear. Even then, he got 147 Republicans in the House and Senate to agree to challenge the results of a fair election.
To cover his tracks, Mr. Trump always goes on offense. First comes what-about-ism (“What about antifa in Portland and Minneapolis in 2020?”), followed by projection. So now he wants to see Liz Cheney prosecuted for “witness tampering” because she spoke with Cassidy Hutchinson in advance of Ms. Hutchinson’s explosive 2022 testimony before the Jan. 6 committee. His attack dogs on Capitol Hill know perfectly well that it’s routine for members of Congress to speak privately with friendly committee witnesses. They do it themselves.
Both sides in the struggle over Jan. 6 are trying to create what the critic Van Wyck Brooks called a “usable past.”
Sometimes these master historical narratives are used for good. The founders invoked the 1786-87 Shays’s Rebellion — a revolt by debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts — as an argument to scrap the Articles of Confederation and write stronger central authority into the new U.S. Constitution, including the power to “suppress domestic insurrections.”
And sometimes the past is merely a prologue to propaganda. Horst Wessel, a young Nazi believed to have been killed by Communists, was turned into a martyr and celebrated in an infamous Nazi song. Don’t be surprised if the J6 Choir — made up of MAGA prisoners whose recording was played at Trump rallies — moves beyond its remix of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “The Ashli Babbitt Song,” named for the woman shot and killed while violently breaking into the Capitol.
“Democracy is a process and we will survive this sucker punch,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said last week. But it’s also a muscle that must be exercised. Future perceptions of Jan. 6 will depend not just on the facts but on who wins the next election. Democracy will determine how the threat to democracy is argued about, without end.
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