Jan. 6 anniversary underlines the national divide
What happened
The nation marked the anniversary of the Jan. 6 uprising last week, a milestone Democrats observed with a day of events that highlighted a deep partisan divide over the meaning of the Capitol riot. For Democrats, it was a day of solemn reflection on an insurrection stoked by Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, which left five people dead, injured more than 140 police officers, and sent lawmakers scurrying for their lives. Members of Congress gathered on the Capitol steps for a candlelight vigil and gave speeches recounting their shock and terror fleeing from an invading mob that smashed its way into the Senate chamber, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and hunting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “America does not yet know just how close we, the members here in this room today, our nation and our democracy came to our demise that terrifying day,” said Rep. Ann Kuster (D-N.H.). President Biden gave a blistering speech focused on Donald Trump and his continued insistence of widespread fraud, calling him a “defeated former president” who “spread a web of lies about the 2020 election.” Unable to accept losing, Trump has put “a dagger at the throat of our democracy,” Biden said.
Except for Sen. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Republicans sat out the events. At a news conference, Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called Democrats “the true insurrectionists,” and invoked the false conspiracy theory that FBI agents instigated the riot. Trump canceled a planned press conference, but issued a statement attacking the “total bias and dishonesty” of the Jan. 6 commission and calling the 2020 election “the Crime of the Century.”
In a televised speech, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to hold “all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.” He said more that 700 participants had been arrested and more than 275 charged with obstruction of Congress, and indicated that prosecutions of those “criminally responsible” for directing the attack may follow. “The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last,” he said.
What the editorials said
“Jan. 6 isn’t in the past,” said The New York Times. Trump’s “twisted version of reality” still holds sway over his party and a “movement that increasingly is openly contemptuous of democracy.” Election officials of both parties are facing death threats, states are making it easier to invalidate election results, and Trump and his acolytes continue to “stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments.” Our democracy “is in grave danger.”
“Democracy isn’t dying,” said The Wall Street Journal. Jan. 6 was a “national
What next?
disgrace,” but the mob and Trump’s “‘war room’ of motley characters” never came close to overturning the election. The fact is that “America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure”—thanks in large part to Republican officials who held firm and certified electoral votes and Republican-appointed judges who rejected “flimsy” election challenges. Not that you’d know that from listening to Democrats who “seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power.”
What the columnists said
Biden’s powerful, angry address was “the speech of his presidency”—and one “he never wanted to give,” said Susan Glasser in The New Yorker. Elected as a uniter, Biden “still had hopes of healing the breach” when he took office in the uprising’s aftermath. Now he’s been forced to acknowledge that Trump and Trumpism “live on as the dominating, unpleasant reality of American political life”— and that he must “stand and fight it.”
The speech proved only that the unpopular Biden is “a drowning man” who’ll “grab onto anything that remotely resembles a life raft,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. The same goes for the rest of his party, who are trying to “criminalize political opposition,” and paint all Trump voters—including the millions who were nowhere near the Capitol during the riot—as “enemies of the state.” That’s “a far greater danger to democracy” than anything that happened on Jan. 6.
A year after the Capitol assault, “what is most striking is not what has changed, but what has not,” said Peter Baker in The New York Times. For a brief moment after that shocking event, it looked like Americans in both political tribes would unite in revulsion “against an attempt to overturn democracy.” Instead, it’s become “heresy” for Republicans to disavow Trump’s Big Lie, and most GOP officials now pretend the attempt to overturn the election “never happened.”
The bipartisan commission investigating the
Capitol insurrection is planning to hold televised hearings—possibly during “evening prime time,” said Billy House in Bloomberg. Evening hearings would give the public “the best opportunity” to hear testimony and weigh evidence, said committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who hopes to begin in late March or early April. The committee, which has interviewed more than 350 witnesses and collected thousands of records, could release an interim report “by mid-year,” and a final report before the November midterms. The committee may make criminal referrals to the Justice Department— and will take a hard look at Trump, said Ryan Nobles and Paul LeBlanc at CNN.com. Committee vice chair Liz Cheney said that if the president attempted “to impede or obstruct the counting of electoral votes, which is an official function of Congress,” he may have committed a crime.
What happened on Jan. 6 was horrific, said Mona Charen in The Bulwark; what’s happened since is worse. That day should have been “the pivot point at which even the most blinkered sugarcoaters of Trumpism recoiled in disgust.” Instead, the GOP has accelerated its transformation into “an authoritarian personality cult,” purged of anyone not loyal to Trump. Among Republican voters—twothirds of whom believe the election was stolen—“Jan. 6 is not even viewed as regrettable.” Trump’s “improvised coup” may have failed, but with such groundwork laid, “another attempt—and even success—is all too possible.”