The Revisionist History of January 6

In the U.S., January 6 is a day that exists outside of context. Did that violent attack on the Capitol really happen? It must have. Millions of people watched Republicans’ fumbling insurrection unfold on live television. Yet fewer Americans today agree on what happened that day than did four years ago. After all of that media coverage and a bipartisan congressional investigation, more Americans than ever before believe the January 6 attack was justified. How is that possible?

Since the days immediately following the January 6 attack, Republican lawmakers and media commentators have been working to downplay and rationalize crimes Americans witnessed with their own eyes. Even more shamefully, many of the lawmakers now peddling January 6 trutherism were among the first people to condemn the attacks as they unfolded. 

An attack that in the moment looked like the final, desperate gasp of a lawless political movement is now held up by Trump’s MAGA-fied Republican Party as a second Boston Tea Party. It has become a founding myth of the new GOP, a point of pride. Its violent insurrectionists are now hailed as heroes and patriots. Trump has pledged not only to pardon the over 1,000 people currently incarcerated in federal prison for their role in the attack, but to issue a formal government apology for daring to arrest them in the first place. 

The transformation of January 6 from a moment of deep cultural shame into another symbol of Republican defiance against a “corrupt government” took only a week, as the party realized just how many of its base voters supported the attack. Lawmakers like Sen. Mitch McConnell, who declared Trump “morally responsible” for the attack in a stinging speech from the floor of the still ransacked senate, caved to a flood of far-right social media conspiracy theories and a web of Republican media commentators eager to sell the attack to their viewers as a Deep State operation involving everyone from the FBI to Antifa to George Soros. 

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace called for Trump to be “held accountable” for his role in the attack, including taking steps to ensure he “never holds office again.” By January 13, Mace’s memory suddenly had become skewed. Now she was blaming both Democrats and Republicans for the violence. A month later, Mace scrubbed earlier Trump criticisms from her website. In January 2024, Mace emerged from her MAGA metamorphoses reborn, endorsing Trump’s re-election bid and assuring reporters that Americans no longer cared about January 6. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, who privately threatened to declare Trump mentally incapacitated under the 25th Amendment on the day of the attack, would later vote to find Trump innocent of any wrongdoing in his Senate impeachment trial. By 2023, Graham no longer even acknowledged Trump’s participation in the events that led to the riot. When asked that year about Trump’s conduct on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Graham reversed course entirely, saying everything Trump did on that day was a legitimate exercise of presidential power, and thus immune from investigation.

The sudden reversals from GOP Sens. McConnell, Graham, Mace, and a huge number of other Republican lawmakers was incredibly shocking because so many of them had experienced the attack firsthand. They recounted their fear to friends and reporters in snippets that only appeared during the House January 6 Committee hearings years later. McConnell still believes Trump is unfit for office, even if he’s no longer able to say so out loud. They knew that the sanitized, Trump-approved version of events was a lie because they had lived the truth. Still, they chose the lie.

That is the power of stripping context from historical events. Pressuring a subservient Congress to rationalize an obvious crime further damages public faith in institutions. So does attacking the lawmakers tasked with investigating the attack. That’s the point. Republicans’ ever-multiplying January 6 storylines are a well-honed disinformation strategy that former Trump aide Steve Bannon eloquently calls “flooding the zone with shit.” The results have paid remarkable dividends for the MAGA movement in just four short years.

In the days that followed the attacks, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that over 6 in 10 Americans believed Trump bore responsibility for the attack. But those numbers softened in the wake of an all-out campaign by Trump and Republicans to recast the event as a series of political prosecutions driven by a vengeful Biden administration. By the beginning of 2024, only about half of Americans viewed the January 6 attacks negatively, and a quarter of voters believed far-right claims that the attack was an FBI-coordinated false flag operation.

The numbers among Republicans have been nothing short of staggering. In 2021 over a third of self-identified Republicans trusted their own eyes and described the January 6 attack as “violent.” By January 2024, a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that half of those Republicans had changed their views, with only 18% saying they felt the riot was violent. In the days after election day in November, that number fell below 15 percent. Is it really possible that so many people—including non-Republicans—are now unsure of what they saw that day? 

Altered by years of hyperpartisan politics and coordinated disinformation campaigns, it’s no longer so easy to describe the attack on the Capitol as simply “good” or “bad.” Those words rely on a shared understanding of American law and culture. In order for moral judgments to matter, the society doing the judging needs to agree on why bad actions are wrong. The transformation of January 6 from a national stain to a partisan rallying cry is the perfect example of a culture shredding its social fabric in real time.

The number of Americans who believe a president can violate the law to achieve political goals has never been higher. It’s impossible to ignore how that shift aligns with Trump’s increasingly bold promises to jail his political opponents and prosecute lawmakers who investigated the January 6 attack. The House GOP has jumped on the autocratic bandwagon, too, with their own effort to prosecute former Rep. Liz Cheney for her role on the January 6 committee.

Voters have been willing to take lawmakers at their word, and the result is a society in which just millions of Americans and nearly half of Republicans no longer have faith in democracy as a system of government. Ensured by their leaders that Trump’s authoritarian promises are meant to put push back against imagined Democratic tyranny,  the number of Republicans who say they want a president who is “willing to break rules and laws” to get things done jumped from 30 percent last year to nearly 50 percent at the end of 2024. 

Those voters no longer view January 6 as “good” or “bad” but as a stepping stone toward a new post-democratic system in which everything they’ve lost will be returned to them and their political opponents will be humbled both socially and in the courts. And the toxic seduction of authoritarianism is now spreading beyond the Republican base, as recent post-election polling shows. Back in June, 68 percent of conservative-leaning independent voters told the Washington Post that they’d be concerned if Trump suspended the law. As of December, that number has fallen to just 55 percent.

Getting millions of Americans to question the reality of an event they witnessed on live television has been in many ways the crowning glory of Trumpism. By persuading those voters that something so visceral and so public was not what it seemed to be, Trump opened the door for those voters to question even more fundamental aspects of our democracy. Eventually, they began to question democracy itself. Through it all, Republicans were only too happy to steer those voters toward an authoritarian alternative to democracy that claimed unprecedented new executive power for Trump.

A country that can’t fully condemn the barbaric domestic terrorism of January 6 will never be able to grapple with what that event truly means. The thousand federal felons who will soon be free will serve as further validation in Republican spheres that their prosecution was illegitimate from the start. Restored to power by voters who no longer know what they think about the January 6 attack, Trump and his allies will now have the power to turn their revisionist history into official history. 

January 6 didn’t cause America’s division into two mutually exclusive realities, but Republicans’ decision to rally behind Trump instead of issuing an unequivocal statement in defense of democracy ensured that division will be deep and long-lasting. We will wrestle with the political fallout of January 6 for the rest of our lives, always prevented from resolution and healing by an inability to agree on the reality of what happened and why. There is no longer a consensus truth to unite our United States. 

Did January 6 really happen? It depends on who you ask.