Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I wasn’t actually planning on writing anything to commemorate this anniversary. The media is full of commemorations and condemnations of what happened at the U.S. Capitol, just as surely as the Republican party is attempting to distort the true record of events into anything except their own complicity in an attempted coup d’état. This blog post is not strictly necessary.

Nevertheless, the only thing that can preserve the memory of what actually happened that day – the day a violent mob of Donald Trump’s supporters, following his direct and personal exhortations, invaded the U.S. Congress to try to stop it from certifying the election of Joe Biden, by assaulting its guards and attempting to kidnap or murder Trump’s political enemies – is for as many people to state the truth as possible. This post is half a drop in a bucket, but it’s a worthy bucket.

I am not yet an old man, but I have always paid attention to the news, and I have been made painfully aware of the shortness of our collective political memory. Americans have the unfortunate tendency to treat politics as a television drama, in which the events of a few seasons past can be forgotten or altered if they conflict with the current storyline. If all of this were a fictional entertainment, we’d call what the Republicans – the Institutional Trumpists – are doing a retcon. Here in the real world, it’s called propaganda and lying.

It is a fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fairly, that Donald Trump and his associates knowingly lied about the election and conspired to overturn it, that Trump himself appeared before the mob and gave it instructions before they marched to the Capitol, that the mob ransacked the Capitol while attempting to reach members of Congress, and that Donald Trump refused repeated pleas to protect Congress or to tell the attackers to stand down. Nothing the Institutional Trumpists can say will alter what happened, what we all saw happen in real time. You can read about it in the final report of the Congressional January Sixth Committee.

Donald Trump won the 2024 election because an insufficient number of voters in key states could be bothered to care about even the most obvious implications of what happened four years ago. They let it all go for a new narrative. It is shameful, but it’s a fact. Perhaps in four years they will be trying to stuff their own negligence and willful ignorance down the memory hole as well, but you can never tell.

Here is that link again, to remind you not only of the case made by the January 6th Committee, but of the thoroughness with which they marshalled the evidence to make their case. Donald Trump is an enemy of democracy and the rule of law; don’t let the Institutional Trumpists fool you into forgetting.