The Verdict On January 6 Is In ... And It's Not Good

One of the worst days in American democracy is becoming yet another partisan football

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

If money is tight or you’re already up to eyeballs in subscriptions, here’s another idea — share this article. Email it to a friend (or even an enemy). Post it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Text or email it to your wife, husband, mother, father, brother, sister, or even your creepy second cousin who lives in Denial. Word of mouth is often the best way to build support for a creative endeavor, so if everyone here sends it to just one person … it would be much appreciated.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging Americans to remember what happened on January 6.

We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.

An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.

This is not what happened.

In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.

Hey Joe … Good luck with all that.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but when it comes to January 6, the truth got knocked out, and it ain’t getting off the canvas.

Like everything else in America, January 6 has become yet another partisan issue — aided by Trump and abetted by his Republican allies and those in conservative media who want Americans to ignore the president-elect’s culpability in inciting a political insurrection.

For example, look at some of the recent polling numbers on January 6.

According to a new CBS/YouGov poll, there has been a gradual shift in the number of Americans who disapprove of the actions of those who stormed the Capitol.

All this is benefiting Trump. Less than 40 percent of Americans say Trump holds a great deal of responsibility for what happened that day.

The numbers are even more depressing regarding pardons for the January 6 defendants, which Trump has promised to issue on day one of his presidency. According to Philip Bump in the Washington Post:

Polling has regularly shown Americans lean significantly against the idea of pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, generally by about 2 to 1. Very few Americans — only about one-quarter in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago — regard their sentences as “too harsh.”

But the new YouGov poll shows just 39 percent of Americans and of independents “strongly” disapprove of such pardons.

But the real proof is in the 2024 election results. Even though a significant majority of Americans still disapprove of what happened that day, a plurality of the electorate was content to vote for the former president who not only refused to accept the 2020 election outcome but also incited the violent mob that stormed the Capitol. It’s one thing not to punish Trump. That’s bad enough. But Americans went a step further: They returned him to office as if January 6 had never happened.

With Trump soon back in the White House, the whitewashing of January 6 will only get worse. Indeed, for those who cast a ballot for him in November, there will be added motivation to play down the violence that day and Trump’s role in fomenting it. What’s better: acknowledging that you voted for a sore loser/insurrectionist or adopting the view that January 6 wasn’t that bad?

It would hardly be surprising if, in the future, Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results are viewed through a predominantly tribal lens. Democrats will continue to condemn it, while Republicans will find some way to justify it. And among the majority of low-information and disengaged Americans, they’ll chalk it up as yet another political dispute. One could easily argue that’s precisely why January 6 wasn’t a decisive concern in the 2024 election. Republicans had so successfully turned the insurrection into a political talking point that I suspect many voters viewed criticisms of Trump’s actions on January 6 as yet another partisan attack rather than a substantive issue that went to the heart of America’s democratic norms.

I’m not as big a pessimist as some people about the future of democracy in America. I think we’ll survive Trump. But on January 6, that train has left the station. The American people rendered the ultimate verdict on Election Day 2024. That was their chance to punish the first president in American history who refused to accept an election result, and they didn’t take it. The depressing read on January 6 and historical memory is that the Americans who lived through that day simply didn’t care.

The price of eggs was too high to trouble themselves with such picayune matters.

What’s Going On

• This is a good New York Times piece on how Trump has inverted the history of January 6.

• The Atlantic has an interesting take on how social media played a key role in distorting the truth about January 6.

• John Sopko has written a searing op-ed on the American delusion that led to twenty years of disaster in Afghanistan.

• Secretary of State Tony Blinken confirms what many of us have assumed for months — that every time there is daylight between the US and Israel or a perception that pressure on Israel was growing, Hamas backed away from a cease-fire deal.

• Shout out to Kamala Harris … yesterday was a rough day for her.

Musical Interlude