Republicans Try To Disappear the MAGA Insurrection on January 6 Down The Memory Hole

The MAGA insurrection on January 6, 2021, is a date which shall live in infamy. It was the darkest day in American history since the start of the Civil War in 1861.

Six months after their “Dear Leader” tried to overturn the election he had lost by more than 7 million votes in a failed coup d’etat, Republicans have settled on a message about the January 6 seditious insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: Insurrection? What insurrection? 6 Months Later, Republicans Have A New Jan. 6 Message: Insurrection? What Insurrection?

From calls to let bygones be bygones, to punishing dissidents who dare criticize former President Donald Trump for instigating that day’s attack, to literally describing the mob as no different from everyday “tourists,” the Republican Party ― with notable exceptions ― has pushed the idea that the unprecedented attempt to overthrow American democracy was really no big deal.

It is a big fucking deal, and a serious felony crime. Everyone involved in the planning, incitement, and carrying out of the attack on the Capitol that injured over 140 Capitol Police officers, resulting in the death of one, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

[I]f recent polling is correct, Republicans appear to be succeeding. According to a recent Morning Consult survey, fully 41% of Americans believe that the riot of Jan. 6 has received “too much attention,” compared with 50% who do not. That figure is driven by 68% of Republicans who say that but includes more than a third of independents and even a quarter of Democrats. [Who the hell are these Democrats?]

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who believes the country barely dodged a constitutional crisis on January 6, said many Americans simply would rather not think about that day.

“It’s human nature to suppress terrible forebodings that don’t quite materialize,” he said, adding that the barrage of Trump-inspired crises during his term likely laid the groundwork. “The cascade of terrible events and near-misses over the past four years has desensitized people if not entirely anesthetized them.”

Hans Noel, a political science professor at Georgetown University, said that Republicans also have an active interest in wishing January 6 away.

“Generally, conservatives, particularly those who get their news from other conservatives, will come to downplay the attack,” Noel said. “Some of that is just believing it’s not a big deal. Some of it is not wanting to talk about uncomfortable facts as they come out. But this is the main thing: The partisan messaging on this has been to downplay it for Republicans, Trump supporters and others on the right.”

Whatever its causes, the process of memory-holing that day reflects Trump’s continued success at fashioning an outrageous lie and then browbeating Republican leaders into going along with him.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, for example, said on January 13 on the House floor that Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” Within weeks, he had gone to visit Trump at his Palm Beach resort and posed for a photo with him. And, at the six-month mark of the mob assault, he is attacking those few GOP House members, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, who refuse to bend to Trump’s will.

McCarthy’s office did not respond to HuffPost queries. On Thursday, he said of Cheney’s acceptance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to serve on a select committee to investigate Jan. 6: “Maybe she’s closer to her than us.” He had warned Republicans who would serve on that panel that they would be stripped of their committee assignments.

“If most Americans have indeed forgotten about January 6, that is in part due to the tenacious efforts of the GOP to downplay it,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University. “For a party whose brand is law enforcement, January 6′s murderous rage against Capitol Police could turn voters off. So they deny the violence ― Trump turned it into ‘hugs and kisses’ ― and block any investigation that would place the facts of it in the public realm.”

It Can’t Happen Here, But Almost Did

Working in Republicans’ favor is just how brazen Trump’s attempt to overturn the November election was.

In 232 years of presidential contests, there have been 16 incumbents who tried to win a second term but failed, starting with John Adams in 1800. Trump was the first to try to overturn democracy itself in an attempt to hang on to power.

“Americans are still somewhat uncomprehending that ‘it can happen here,’ in terms of the demise of their democracy,” said Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism.

Though there was no legal way for Trump to undo Democrat Joe Biden’s victory after the Electoral College formally completed its tally on Dec. 14, Trump was not particularly interested in legalities. Instead, he spent weeks, according to Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, pushing his vice president to simply reject enough electoral votes from states Biden had won to wind up with more and declare himself the winner.

And although Pence had no constitutional authority to do what Trump wanted, nothing prevented him from doing as Trump demanded anyway ― an action that would have unleashed unimaginable chaos, possibly including armed conflict in the streets, upon the country.

“Very few people ever understood what would have happened and where we would be as a nation had the vice president not certified the Electoral College vote,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appellate judge nominated by President George H.W. Bush.

That lack of understanding played into the hands of Republicans whose greatest success has been to obfuscate January 6’s uniqueness in American history by lumping it in with other violence, such as the vandalism and looting that at times accompanied protests last summer over the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans.

In fact, while mayhem at protests was typically carried out at its fringes by criminals and opportunists [and agitators like the Proud Boys], the assault on the Capitol was organized by Trump’s most hard-core supporters and encouraged by Trump himself, who told his followers to gather in Washington, D.C., on that specific day and staged a rally asking them to “march” on the building minutes before the Electoral College tally began.

New York Times video: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol.

“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said at the rally.

After his mob started assaulting police officers defending the building and broke doors and windows to enter, Trump did nothing to dissuade them for hours. Rather, at 2:24 p.m., with his vice president and his staff and family in hiding, Trump attacked Pence on Twitter, telling his followers that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to overturn the election as Trump had wanted.

His followers responded with rage, roaming the building looking for him while chanting: “Hang Mike Pence!”

A gallows had already been erected outside.

Insurrectionist-In-Chief To 2024 Front-runner

Six months later, Trump’s actions in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 and on that day itself seem almost irrelevant ― even though they triggered an historic second impeachment.

In any other country in the world, Trump would have suffered one of three immediate consequences for his failed coup d’etat: imprisonment, execution, or exile. Only in America can he go on a “Loser Palooza” Tour of campaign rallies playing his golden oldies of grievances for the MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump.

What the hell is taking the U.S. Justice Department so long to bring charges against Donald Trump and the others who incited the insurrection that day? (including Rudy Giuliaini and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who is now running for the Senate). It was all done live on TV, and recorded on tape. The DOJ is sitting on mountains of evidence, far more than it needs to file charges.

The Republican National Committee cites Trump multiple times per week in fundraising pitches, as do its Senate and House arms. “You’re one of President Trump’s TOP supporters, so we wanted to make sure that you had a chance to sign his Official Birthday Card,” the RNC wrote to its email list on June 14.

Trump last month resumed his rallies with one in Ohio, ostensibly to push a former White House aide running against one of the 10 GOP House members who voted to impeach Trump. But during the rally, he again continued with the same Big Lie about the election that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Recently, he has started openly defending the violent mob he incited to attack the Capitol. “By the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who?” he asked at his Florida rally on Saturday, referring to the woman who was fatally shot by Capitol Police as she tried to climb through a broken window into an anteroom from which House members were being evacuated.

Note: Arizona’s piece-of-shit white nationalist insurrectionist congressman who aided and abetted the January 6 insurrection picked up Trump’s rally mantra today. Six Months After Jan. 6, Paul Gosar Demands Charges Against Cop Who Shot Ashli Babbitt:

Days after former president Trump demanded to know the name of the police officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol insurrection, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) cheered and welcomed the support for the far-right cause célèbre.

“Six months ago today, Ashli Babbitt, a 110-pound woman with nothing in her hands, not a rock, not a stick or a bat, was shot dead by a still unknown Capitol Hill police officer,” reads a press release issued by Gosar’s office. “And now President Trump has joined me in seeking the truth.”

Gosar has taken a lead role in stoking rage on the right-wing fringe about Babbitt’s death. A Capitol police officer shot and and killed Babbitt on Jan. 6 as she, backed up by a mob of rioters, climbed through a doorway into the House Speaker’s Gallery, where members of Congress were evacuating.

A DOJ inquiry did not find evidence to support charges against the officer; Babbitt’s family have sued D.C. for records on the officer.

But Gosar, who has ties to the far-right, has taken a lead role in pushing the idea that the federal government “executed” Babbitt. When DOJ officials have come before the House Oversight Committee, on which Gosar sits, to testify about Jan. 6, Gosar has used it as an opportunity to ask who “executed” Babbitt.

In the statement, Gosar restated his mantra of the past few months, demanding to know the identity of the officer who killed Babbitt while claiming the existence of a shadowy “effort to cover up the full circumstances of this homicide and the American people won’t stand for it.”

He once again referred to Babbitt’s death as an “execution,” saying that “we do not allow the execution of citizens by street ‘justice’ in our country.”

He went on to ask in the statement “why have no charges been brought against the shooter for negligent homicide or more?”

Because Ashli Babbitt was a goddamn domestic terrorist who was shot while trying to crawl through a broken window in the door to the Speakers Lobby of the House of Representatives where members of Congress were being evacuated from the House chamber by Capitol Police. If I had been there, I would have shot every one of those motherfuckers trying to break down the doors to the Speakers Lobby. That’s how I feel about those goddamn domestic terrorists, and I do not apologize for it.

Trump followed that by conflating the domestic terrorists who wanted to overturn democracy on his behalf with civil rights protests and street crime. “And how come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6 when nobody paid a price for the fire and carnage and death that took place in Democrat-run cities throughout our country, including Antifa and BLM?” he asked the crowd. “How come? How come?”

Too many of the MAGA domestic terrorists have been released on their own recognizance or out on bail. They should have all been held until they go on trial, like the members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who are jailed until they go on trial. And they should be joined by the man who incited the seditious insurrection, Donald Trump.

[N]otwithstanding criminal investigations into his business practices in New York and his attempt to coerce elections officials in Georgia, Trump is the preferred choice among Republicans as their 2024 nominee, with the majority of them now believing that Biden’s election was illegitimate.

The GQP is a morally bankrupt criminal enterprise.

Rick Tyler, a top aide to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 bid for the GOP nomination, blamed the polarized nature of politics today. “So skeptical are Americans now about what passes the lips of a politician that nothing is believed. Efforts to examine January 6 are viewed entirely through a political lens where understanding what happened is secondary to political objectives. That’s a dangerous road upon which we should not travel.”

But Amy Fried, a political science professor at the University of Maine and co-author of the forthcoming book “At War With Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust From Goldwater to Trump,” said the polarization is not symmetrical between the parties and that conservatives in recent decades have actively worked to sow distrust of institutions. “There are a lot of issues where the parties are polarized or have become more polarized over time; climate change is one. But this is rather extraordinary because we could all use our own eyes to see the footage of the insurrection.”

And that denial of a reality that was available for all to witness on live television is good reason for alarm, former President Barack Obama told the American Library Association conference last week.

“The guardrails I thought were in place around many of our democratic institutions really depend on the two parties agreeing to those ground rules and … one of them right now doesn’t seem as committed to them as in previous generations. That worries me,” Obama said. “And I think we should all be worried.”

Damn right we should all be worried. Only one political party is committed to the Constitution, and to American democracy, and that is the Democratic Party. The Republican Party is now an anti-democratic authoritarian crypto-fascist personality cult of Donald Trump, which represents the greatest national security threat of domestic terrorism to our country.