With Trump moving closer to renomination, rewriting Jan. 6 attack gains urgency

by Philip Bump,

There is no mystery about the Capitol riot. There is nothing intangible, no unseen engine for what occurred. There is no uncertainty about what happened and why.

But because everything about what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, implicates the cultural leader of the Republican Party — and because pretending that a mystery exists benefits him — we approach the third anniversary of that day with renewed efforts to rewrite its history.

In short, the day’s violence was carried out by Trump supporters and supporters of Trump’s politics. They were there not only because Trump specified that day and place as the location of a “protest” but because he’d relentlessly argued that a protest was needed. The intent was explicitly to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That Trump used the word “peacefully” once in his speech is no more exculpatory than the fact that thousands of Trump supporters weren’t violent and didn’t enter the Capitol. There was violence and there were violent actors; they were there because Trump refused to accept that voters had rejected him.

There was a point at which this might have understandably seemed like the coda to Trump’s tenure in politics. Trump lost the election and then stoked a violent response to the transfer of power. History books, if not Hollywood, suggest an epilogue in which he spends his remaining years exiled to the wilderness.

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