The history of January 6 is being rewritten

Anthony Vo has been spending the New Year snowboarding in British Columbia and hoping for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.

So what? He may get one. Four years ago to the day, Vo took part in the January 6 insurrection in Washington. He was later arrested but he skipped bail, fled north and applied for asylum in Canada as a political refugee persecuted for his beliefs in his homeland.

Vo subscribes to a largely fact-free world view that rejects science-based climate and health policies and rejects free trade in favour of protectionism. It also

• sees no threat from Trump to democracy or the rule of law;
• is shared by tens of millions of Americans;
• prevailed in last year’s election; and
• will shape the US and thus the world for at least the next four years.

Like it never happened. With two weeks left of the Biden presidency his successor has indicated he will pardon most if not all jailed January 6 insurrectionists.

Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, has ended his effort to hold Trump to account for his role in the affair, upholding a convention that the Department of Justice doesn’t prosecute sitting presidents.

And a through-the-looking-glass narrative is taking hold, especially among those about to take charge of the FBI and the US criminal justice system, in which the rioters who tried to overturn the result of the 2020 election are victims of an historic injustice.

• Trump has vowed retribution against those he holds responsible, chief among them Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, co-chairs of a January 6 congressional committee that worked for three years to establish a true narrative immune to revisionism.
• Both have been awarded presidential medals by Biden. Neither will relish Trump’s inauguration on 21 January. Pam Bondi, his nominee for US Attorney General and a former defence lawyer for Trump during his first impeachment trial, has said “the investigators will be investigated”.

Meanwhile on day one. Expect some follow-through on promises of the biggest mass deportation of illegal immigrants in US history. This was the “build a wall” pledge of 2024, mentioned 25 times in the campaign as a Day One undertaking. But expect it to be mainly performative. Expelling sub-minimum wage labour en masse is too expensive, disruptive and inflationary to do for real. Fareed Zakaria tells Foreign Policy he imagines something “very public, very grand, probably very cruel, but very limited”.

The “most beautiful” word. There will be tariffs, because Trump is protectionist to his core and wants them to fund tax cuts. But if too steep they will

• widen deficits by strengthening the dollar and raising the cost of exports;
• shrink America’s share of world trade; and
• fuel inflation, which all but cost the Democrats the election and which Trump has promised to control.

So is his talk of tariffs mainly a threat to strongarm trading partners into granting US firms better access to their markets? That would make more sense than imposing them. The question is whether Trump wants to be a sensible president.

You said it, Jimmy. Democrats are still processing voters’ big shrug at Trump’s felony, venality and duplicity. James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist who told his party in the 1990s “it’s the economy, stupid,” predicted it would retain the White House last November. He’s been ruminating as to why it didn’t:

“It’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments – even if they are justified – or about his anti-democratic impulses or about social issues if they cannot provide for themselves or their families.”

What’s more… More than 1,400 others indicted over January 6 are hoping, like Anthony Vo, that their new president will take advantage of this indifference to everything but kitchen table questions, and pardon them. History is being rewritten by the victors.

Further listening: in This Was a Coup, Tortoise’s David Taylor asked ringside witnesses what Trump’s team was really trying to accomplish on January 6, 2021. We Live Here Now, from The Atlantic, tells the story of two DC journalists who found their new neighbour was the mother of a rioter killed that day.