It seems like the third anniversary of the MAGA insurrection at the Capitol got more attention this year than in 2022 and 2023. Maybe because it’s an election year? I’m not sure, but I think it’s a good thing.
As Josh Marshall observed today at TPM, 1/6/2021 is as relevant as ever because the coup attempt “remains at the center of our politics.” That’s because in fact it is still ongoing, as Adam occasionally reminds us. It didn’t have to be this way, but this is the reality:
We can imagine an alternative timeline in which our version of January 6th happened but Trump and his supporters were thoroughly discredited by their attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. Trump discredited. Perhaps he is under arrest. The Republican party is forced to reckon with the national betrayal it embraced and led. A new Republican leadership would slowly begin to emerge.
Needless to say this is not what happened. Rather than repudiate the attempted coup – which seemed barely possible until some point on January 8th – the party embraced it, validated it, pursued a consistent policy of protecting the reputation and freedom of those who carried it out. It is true enough that a bare majority of elected Republicans won’t explicitly excuse the behavior of the individual insurrectionists who committed discrete crimes of assault, vandalism and trespass on January 6th. But shock troops are always expendable. The coup attempt itself – the criminal effort to remain in power after clearly losing a free and fair election – the institutional Republican party has defended on every front. The vanishingly small number of elected Republicans who denounced this crime are easily identified by the fact that they have all been driven out of the party.
Just today on Face the Nation, Speaker Mike Johnson refused to say Biden won the 2020 election fair and square and defended Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric. On Meet the Press, MAGA try-hard Elise Stefanik (R-NY) tap-danced to the same tune as Johnson on the 2020 election outcome (constitutional violations!) and refused to commit to certifying the 2024 election results.
So yeah, it’s January 7, 2024 but it’s still January 6, 2021. We’ll have to keep reliving that damned day until the coup leaders are held accountable and their apologists are discredited and/or bounced out of office. Maybe this election year will be a turning point. When the former liar in chief collects his party’s nomination, he’ll be shouting in our faces like an airhorn again. That will suck, but it might be clarifying too.
Open thread.
