Why the Jan. 6 ‘Insurrection’ Argument Falls Flat

Whatever Trump’s role, the riot was one of many cases of Covid-era folly. Most voters would prefer not to be reminded.

President Biden has based his 2024 campaign on a theme that, as a consequence of the failed assassination attempt on his opponent, now sounds dissonant and unbecoming. That theme is that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy.” The evidence for that claim, other than some of Mr. Trump’s zanier remarks over the years, consists mainly of one thing: the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Democrats bring up this event at nearly every opportunity. The New York Times and Washington Post have never stopped running stories about every detail of that day and its aftermath. The riot is routinely called an “insurrection,” as if such a motley crowd, acting on a lamebrained theory about the Electoral Count Act of 1887, could have overthrown the government and imposed a dictatorship.

It’s true that the Jan. 6 riot was a disgrace and an embarrassment to the United States. But Democrats have vastly overinterpreted its political significance. Their belief that it would work as a peremptory argument against a second Trump term was a fantasy. To understand why, consider another event, which almost all of us would rather forget: the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike the vast majority of the lawbreakers who looted stores, vandalized monuments and attacked government buildings the previous summer, the Jan. 6 protesters were, almost to a man, found and prosecuted. Of more than 1,250 charged, more than half pleaded guilty, many offering apologies. Nonetheless the media and the Democratic Party settled on a preposterously overwrought term for this misbegotten event: “insurrection.”

The events of Jan. 6 were generated by pandemic-year poor judgment. Which is why Republicans will pay the same electoral price for it that Democrats have paid for lockdowns, school closings and onerous, pointless mandates: almost none. The Biden re-election campaign has based its entire effort on the idea that Mr. Trump is a “threat to democracy” and therefore that Jan. 6, or something like it, could happen again. To gauge the wisdom of that strategy, imagine Republicans basing their entire 2024 campaign on the idea that Democrats imposed senseless public-health mandates four years ago and will do it again if Mr. Biden wins.

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