GOP right wing rewrites Jan. 6 riot
Republicans willing to look past, expand on Trump’s telling
In the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office.
By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of the party described the Capitol riot as a peaceful protest and compared the invading mob to a “normal tourist visit,” as one congressman put it.
This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, telling a new counternarrative of that deadly day.
No longer content to absolve Trump, they concocted a version of events in which accused rioters were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.
Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.
This rendering of events — together with new evidence that Trump had counted on
allies in Congress to help him use a baseless allegation of corruption to overturn the election — pointed to what some democracy experts see as a new sign in American politics: Even with Trump gone from the White House, many Republicans have little intention of abandoning the prevarication that was a hallmark of his presidency.
Rather, as the country struggles with the consequences of Trump’s assault on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections, leaders of his party are signaling their willingness to continue, look past or even expand his assault on the facts.
Behind the Republican embrace of disinformation is a calculus of both ambition and self-preservation.
With members of the select committee hinting that they could subpoena Trump aides, allies on Capitol Hill and perhaps Trump himself, the counterattack could preemptively undercut an investigation of the riot.
As videos shown during the hearing gave harrowing new reminders of the day’s violence, leading House Republicans claimed that Pelosi — a target of the mob — had been warned about the violence in advance but failed to prevent it.
Trump suggested that Pelosi should “investigate herself,” yet again falsely insinuating that antifa and Black Lives Matter — not his followers — caused the destruction on Jan. 6 and that a democratically decided election had been
stolen from him.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican, who once led his party in condemning both the riot and Trump’s role in it, told reporters he had not watched the hearing and had little new to say about the attack.
House Republicans’ desire to bury the attack on their own workplace has created a dysfunctional governing atmosphere. Pelosi has increasingly treated them as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust, and has expressed disdain for Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader.
Almost as soon as the police retook control Jan. 6, hard-core defenders of Trump in Congress began
recasting the gruesome scenes of violence that left five people dead.
McCarthy, R-Calif., responded differently at first: He demanded that Trump stop the rioters, according to an account he gave fellow Republicans at the time. A week later, as the House moved to impeach Trump, McCarthy said that “the president bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters” and called for a fact-finding commission.
But in the months since, that early resolve has given way to an intent to bury the attack. McCarthy, who is trying to win back the majority in 2022, moved quickly to patch things up with Trump, gave latitude to far-right members of his
caucus and worked to block the creation of an independent 9/11-style commission.
Some senior Republicans insist that warnings of a whitewash are overwrought.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to be successful erasing what happened,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “Everybody saw it with their own eyes, and the nation saw it on television.”
Most Republican lawmakers instead simply try to say nothing at all, declining even to recount the day’s events. Asked how he would describe the riot, in which a crowd demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, his brother, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Ind., responded, “I don’t describe it.”