In the three years since then-President Donald Trump—unable to accept he was defeated in a fair contest in which numerous investigations and Republican election officials found no significant voter fraud—incited a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, his MAGA followers have gone through various stages of grief.
First, they insisted that the rioters—who viciously beat police officers, chanted things like “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence,” and ransacked the House Speaker’s office—were actually Antifa supersoldiers planting a false flag.
Later, Trump cultists adopted the line that “the protesters were right to be angry”—pointing to the ridiculous, lie-filled documentary 2,000 Mules as indisputable evidence the election was stolen by a vast deep state conspiracy (it was not).
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Nowadays, the Jan. 6 deadenders have pretty much settled on “OK, they were Trump supporters and the riot looked really bad, but it was all an FBI setup.”
And it’s not just the overtly MAGA spreading this stupidity. It’s gleefully pushed by the uber-famous Intellectual Dark Web podcaster Joe Rogan—who has never met an unhinged, illogical, evidence-free conspiracy theory he couldn’t latch on to and propagate to his legion of millions.
Right-wing edgelord presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently tweeted, “There is clear evidence that there was at the very least entrapment of peaceful protestors” on Jan. 6—and one of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files stenographers, Michael Shellenberger, tweeted the assault on the Capitol was not “an attempted insurrection,” but merely “a riot resulting from a security failure, which may have been deliberate.”
According to a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, a quarter of Americans believe there’s at least some truth to the false claim that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6 attack. That number goes up to 34 percent among Republicans, and 44 percent among avowed Trump voters.
This level of conspiratorial brain rot can’t only be pinned on Trump and his co-conspirators’ lies about nonexistent mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s attempted self-coup—defined as “performed by the current, legitimate government or a duly elected head of state to retain or extend control over government, through an additional term, an extension of term, an expansion of executive power, the dismantling of other government branches, or the declaration that an election won by an opponent is illegitimate”—is bigger than Jan. 6.
And at least some responsibility for the collective shrug by so many Americans must be borne by the “just asking questions” hucksters fanning this innuendo. (While posturing as bulwarks against what they insist are the real authoritarian threats: the news media and the Democratic Party—and insisting they’re just honest, free speech-loving populists and not infotainers pandering to a right-wing audience.)
I don’t expect intellectual honesty or moral consistency from such gullible hysterics masquerading as fearless truth tellers. But even among a certain set of less audience-captured, non-MAGA centrists, the prevailing narrative is that Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection or an attempted self-coup because the assailants weren’t armed (some were) and that Biden’s election was ultimately certified that same night (even though 147 Republicans still voted against certifying the results).
Former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, a Trump opponent, recently wrote a column titled, “Why All This Trump Hysteria?,” which is (you guessed it) not about the bonkers conspiracy theories pushed by people in his own political orbit, but rather that anti-Trumpers are unreasonable to consider Trump an authoritarian, because as president he “proved to be something of a simpleton—or if we want to be kind, a naif—who was constantly tripped up and outmaneuvered by his own bureaucrats,” and that he’s “too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship—and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny.”
Then-President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump depart the White House on Jan. 20, 2021.
Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty ImagesGurri devotes exactly one paragraph to Trump’s attempt to illegitimately stay in power, in which he dismisses the notion that it was an attempted insurrection, but rather, a mere “trespassing mob.” He glides past so much evidence that Trump attempted a coup it’s hard to know where to begin.
So let’s try a counterfactual: Imagine Jan. 6 never happened.
Pretend there wasn’t direct coordination between Trump’s “Stop the Steal” allies and far-right gangs like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Pretend the mob—including those wearing “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts and carrying the traitorous Confederate battle flag through the Capitol—wasn’t directly incited by Trump’s rant at the Ellipse. And pretend Trump didn’t think the attack would be pivotal in his quest to illegitimately stay in power.
(As Adam Serwer wrote this week in The Atlantic: “Although turning the mob on the Capitol may have appeared impulsive, we now know from Trump’s unpublished tweet drafts and emails from the campaign itself that using the mob to coerce Congress into overturning the results was a premeditated act. He publicly encouraged the mob on Twitter as the Capitol was being breached, while refusing to use his authority to assist the overwhelmed Capitol police, because he hoped the mob would achieve its objective of keeping him in power.”)
Pretend GOP leader Mitch McConnell didn’t warn that if Trump’s attempt to overturn the election were to succeed, “our democracy would enter a death spiral.” And when speaking of the riot itself, imagine McConnell never said, “We all were here. We saw what happened. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
Now, memory-hole McConnell’s assessment that the Trump-incited rioters “used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like” and “There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.” (McConnell voted to acquit Trump at his second impeachment anyway, thinking the ex-president’s political career was certainly dead and buried by his self-coup attempt. Woops.)
Pretend none of that happened (even though it all did).
Trump still attempted a self-coup, for months, and Jan. 6 was merely the loudest, most frightening, and nationally embarrassing physical manifestation of his attempt to steal the presidency.
As helpfully compiled by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, here’s just the first 11 findings of the Jan. 6 Committee’s report:
“1. Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud…
2. Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election…
3. Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes…
4. Donald Trump sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice. . . .
5. Donald Trump unlawfully pressured State officials and legislators…
6. Donald Trump oversaw an effort to transmit false electoral certificates…
7. Donald Trump pressured Members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors…
8. Donald Trump purposely verified false information filed in Federal court…
9. Donald Trump summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6…
10. Donald Trump purposely sent a social media message publicly condemning Vice President Pence…
11. Donald Trump refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol…”
These are thoroughly vetted facts, not really disputed by anyone. And they unequivocally constitute an attempted self-coup.
Then-President Donald Trump looks on during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Dec. 7, 2020.
Saul Loeb/Getty ImagesIt’s mortifying that tens of millions of Americans believe Jan. 6 was an FBI false flag operation. But it’s terrifying that even more Americans still wrongly believe Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.
In focusing only on the Jan. 6 riot (and dismissing it as much ado about nothing), while feigning selective blindness to the much more significant treason, contrarian anti-anti-Trumpers are willing accomplices to the Big Lie. And they won’t be any help to the preservation of democracy and the rule of law when Trump, inevitably, tries it again.
