Four years ago today while I watched on television as Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol during the joint session of Congress to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election I thought to myself, “it’s finally over. Trump can’t possibly come back after this.” Until then I had assumed that he would immediately start his comeback. It didn’t occur to me that he could survive inciting this violent assault, especially since he egged it on as it was happening:
As we later saw on video, the crowd soon began chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
Later in the evening Trump finally emerged and put out a video telling the rioters he understood why they were so upset about all the evil people who “stole” the election but they needed to go home now. He said he loved them and that they were very special:
Over many hours we watched as bizarre Trump supporters occupied the Senate floor and took possession of the dais. The Capitol was vandalized and trashed and rioters beat police over the head with American flags. It was the most shockingly surreal event I’ve ever witnessed in American politics. The whole world was stunned by the live pictures we saw over the course of that momentous afternoon.
Yet later that night, once the police and National Guard restored order and the rioters dispersed, Congress returned to the Capitol and they certified the election. For many people that signaled that the guardrails had held, that the Constitution was intact and that American democracy was preserved.
But when 147 Republicans still voted to overturn the election even after all that had happened, it was clear to me that was premature and that Trump wasn’t done with us yet. They were all politicians, after all, with a much better knowledge of how the system works than most Americans and they knew his insistence that he’d actually won the election was a lie. Yet they voted to steal the election anyway, despite the violent insurrection that had taken place just hours earlier.
Oh sure, many Republicans did make statements condemning the insurrection and criticizing Donald Trump for his incitement. But within days you could feel them starting to pull back, especially after they experienced moments like this when Lindsey Graham was faced with rabid Trump supporters angry that he’d said “count me out.”
Over the course of many months, between law enforcement and the media investigations culminating in the incredible work of the Jan. 6 committee, the evidence showed over and over again exactly what had happened. Donald Trump was psychologically incapable of admitting that he lost and certain people around him were more than willing to push the envelope to see if they could get away with overturning the results of an election. Through sheer chutzpah and mind-numbing repetition, they first managed to persuade many of Trump’s most loyal voters that the election had been stolen. They flooded the zone with accusations and lies and when Republican officials denied that there were irregularities and recounts showed no discrepancies they attacked the officials. When the courts failed to find evidence of fraud and dismissed all but one case they claimed the courts were biased. They even managed to excuse Trump’s trying to cajole election officials into “finding” thousands of votes to put him over the top on tape. And it worked. By Jan. of 2021, 66% of Republicans believed the election was stolen.
They proved that it was possible to beguile tens of millions of voters into not only believing a Big Lie when Donald Trump told it but even when they’d seen with their own eyes that it wasn’t true.
Jan. 6 was their last-ditch effort to overturn the election. Had Mike Pence agreed to pretend that there was a legitimate controversy about the election results in the swing states where they’d recruited activists to pretend to be alternate electors they might have succeeded. The whole thing was a corrupt set-up engineered by Trump henchmen. The idea was to reject those states to lower the threshold of required electoral votes allowing Trump to win. If the Democrats objected, as they certainly would, Trump planned to then try to throw the election to the House (as the Constitution provides if it was a tie) in which case Trump would also win. (The mastermind of that coup plot, John Eastman, was even later revealed to have been counting on his good friend Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to step in to issue a stay of the Georgia electoral count to give them the hook they needed.)
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It was a ridiculous idea made up out of whole cloth, but Donald Trump 100% bought into it. On Jan. 6 when it became clear that Pence wasn’t going to play ball, Trump decided to shoot the moon and send his crazed, overwrought followers to the Capitol to intimidate the Congress and stop the count. There could be no other reason to tell them to march down there.
They didn’t succeed in keeping Donald Trump in office but they won something even more important. They proved that it was possible to beguile tens of millions of voters into not only believing a Big Lie when Donald Trump told it but even when they’d seen with their own eyes that it wasn’t true.
The whole country watched the riot unfold in real time. There were hours and hours more of video that emerged in subsequent days. Witnesses from Trump’s own inner circle testified about his state of mind and how he behaved that day. And there have been hundreds of court cases decided by juries finding that people who participated in the event were guilty of crimes. Yet the New York Times published a depressing article over the weekend examining how Trump and his minions have managed to completely turn Jan. 6 upside down in his supporters’ minds. They’ve convinced them that the rioters not only did nothing wrong that day, but they are now supposedly being held as political prisoners and hostages. They say there wasn’t much damage to the Capitol, Mike Pence wasn’t really in danger, the whole thing is overblown and it’s the Jan. 6 committee that should be jailed rather than those who beat cops nearly to death on the steps of the Capitol that day.
The article lays out the full trajectory of this new Big Lie that is so preposterous you’d think the people who believe it must be living in another dimension. But it’s had an effect even on the population that doesn’t believe the conspiracy theories that the Trump voters do. Many people understandably have come to accept that it really wasn’t a threat to democracy or the Constitution since Donald Trump was elected to a second term in what everyone agrees was a fair election and therefore, the system still works, no harm no foul.
But it didn’t work. Trump was never held accountable either because of partisan support in the Senate which voted 57-43 to impeach him after Jan. 6, falling short of the 2/3rds supermajority which would have precluded him from running again. (Only seven Republicans voted to convict.) And the law was just too slow to hold him responsible even though both federal and state grand juries returned indictments of him and his co-conspirators for what they did. The Supreme Court eventually weighed in in his favor on clearly partisan grounds.
We now know that if partisans are corrupt, deluded or just plain opportunistic enough and they have the will and the means to lie without shame or restraint, they can circumvent all the checks and balances that were built into the Constitution to prevent a president who plotted a coup against the United States from returning to power.
January 6, 2025, should be a reminder of the assault on our democracy four years ago. Instead, I’m afraid it’s yet another reminder that far too few people in this country actually care.
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