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THE ERASURE OF JANUARY 6  
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David Corn
January 6, 2026
Mother Jones
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_ Five years later, MAGA World is still engaging in its Orwellian
rewriting of history. _

Pro-Trump supporters and far-right forces attacking the US Capitol on
January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election., Michael
Nigro/Sipa/AP

 

In _1984_, George Orwell observed that a fascist state relies upon
its ability to control—or obliterate—memory. As Winston Smith, the
ill-fated protagonist, ponders the Party’s ability to manipulate
reality and history, Orwell writes, “Everything faded into mist. The
past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the
truth.” Another passage in the novel describes the Party’s
relentless effort to construct the dominant narrative: “Every record
has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every
picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has
been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always
right.”

Sound familiar?

It’s been five years since a mob of thousands of Donald Trump
supporters—which included Christian nationalists, white
supremacists, neo-Nazis, Confederate flag wavers, militia members, and
other extremists—assaulted the US Capitol to try to halt the
peaceful transfer of power from an outgoing president to an incoming
president. The basic facts are well established: Trump refused to
accept legitimate election results. He falsely claimed he had won the
2020 contest and spread baseless lies and conspiracy theories about
the election. He spent weeks scheming to overturn the election and
remain in power. Promoting these falsehoods, he incited that
insurrectionist attack on Congress in which more than 140 law
enforcement officers were injured. While the melee was occurring, he
abandoned his duty to defend the Constitution and waited 187 minutes
before calling on his brownshirts to leave the Capitol.

This is all undeniable. Yet Trump and his cult refuse to accept these
fundamentals. Like the Party in Orwell’s dystopia, Trump and the
Republicans have sought to rewrite history and erase the stain of
Trump’s profound betrayal of America. He pardoned the violent
marauders, and his henchmen in charge of the FBI and Justice
Department have fired agents and prosecutors who participated in the
investigation and prosecution of these thugs. And Trump’s MAGA
legions mounted a disinformation campaign that advanced various
conspiracy theories—the FBI did it! Antifa did it!—to absolve
Trump and his thugs.

More important, an entire political party and tens of millions of
American voters memory-holed Trump’s war on American democracy and
his embrace of political violence. What is perhaps the gravest
transgression ever committed by a US president has been airbrushed out
of the picture and the perp allowed (by a majority of voters) to
return to the scene of the crime. This is one of the most worrisome
turns in American history. If our democracy cannot protect itself from
such peril and repel such a dangerous threat, can it survive?

Trump’s triumph over reality was made clear this past week. On New
Year’s Eve—one of the deadest times for the news cycle—the
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released the closed-doors
testimony it had recently received from Jack Smith, the special
counsel who led the investigations that indicted Trump for conspiring
to overturn the 2020 election and for allegedly swiping highly
sensitive White House documents. Both cases ended after Trump won the
election in November. (Under Justice Department policy, a sitting
president cannot be prosecuted for federal crimes.)

Smith, as you know, has been repeatedly denounced by Trump as a
lunatic who waged witch hunts and investigated hoaxes generated by his
fellow Deep Staters, the Democrats, and the media. And Republicans
hauled Smith in as part of their never-ending crusade to find (or
concoct) evidence to bolster Trump’s paranoid fantasies and
conspiracy theories—and to buttress their hyperbolic charge that
Trump and Republicans have been the victims of what they call the
“weaponization of government.”

Smith insisted on a public appearance, apparently knowing he had the
goods on Trump. The Republicans said no and questioned him in a
private session—all the better for controlling the narrative. The
fact that they made public the transcript on a holiday night tells you
what you need to know about who got the best of whom.

The 255-page transcript
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an important document that every citizen should read. (I know, I’m
being fanciful.) Smith ran circles around the GOP committee members
and their staff. “Our investigation developed proof beyond a
reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to
overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful
transfer of power,” Smith said at the start. He added, “Our
investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that
President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after
he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club,
including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to
obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those
documents.”

Smith patiently explained how Trump’s (alleged) crime related to
January 6: “January 6th was an attack on the structure of our
democracy in which over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were
assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police
that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates
tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal
scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020
election.”

This is an accusation that sums up Trump’s perfidy: He tried to take
advantage of this spasm of cop-beating violence to illegally remain in
office. That foul deed should have disqualified Trump from ever
holding any position of authority. Yet…

A key exchange occurred when a Republican staffer (whose name is
redacted in the transcript) asked, “The President’s statements
that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are
statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?” This
has been a central contention of the Trump cult: You cannot prosecute
Trump for stating his _opinion_ that the election was rigged against
him. But Smith fired back: “Absolutely not. If [these false
statements] are made to target a lawful government function and they
are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not.” Statements made to
promote a fraud are not protected by the First Amendment.

Later on in his testimony, Smith remarked that the elections case
against Trump was much like an “affinity fraud”—that’s when,
he said, “you try to gain someone’s trust, get them to trust you
as a general matter, and then you rip them off, you defraud them.”
Trump, he told the committee, “had people…who had built up trust
in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that.”
And once again, Smith reiterated, fraud is not covered by the First
Amendment.

This Republican staffer took another shot at it and said, “There’s
a long history of candidates speaking out about they believe there’s
been fraud [in an election]…I think you would agree that those types
of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of
a Presidential candidate, right?”

Not at all, Smith replied: “There is no historical analog for what
President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was
free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to
say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do
was violate federal law and use knowing—knowingly false statements
about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he
was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past
history.”

 
The Republicans kept trying to mount a theoretical defense for Trump.
This staffer pointed out that during the hullabaloo over the 2020
election, Trump was receiving information on supposed election fraud
from Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Sidney Powell,
and he asked, wasn’t Trump just “regurgitating what these people
have told him?”

Smith had a sharp retort:

No. And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we
had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political
enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies. We
had numerous witnesses who would say, “I voted for President Trump.
I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win.” The speaker
of the house in Arizona. The speaker of the house in Michigan. We had
an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former congressman who was going
to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were
trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.
Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance
to the country before the party.

Call 911. There was a murder in this Capitol Hill office, as Smith
decimated the various lines of defense Trump’s handmaids hurled at
him. He forcibly denied Trump’s indictments were political acts or
that his office had been “weaponized.” In an exchange with Rep.
Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), he explained the importance of his
investigation.

Jayapal: What happens if there is election interference and the people
who are responsible for that are not held accountable?

Smith: It becomes the new norm, and that becomes how we—how we
conduct elections.

Jayapal: And so the toll on our democracy, if you had to describe
that, what would that be?

Smith: Catastrophic.

The Smith transcript generated headlines…for a day. Like most
everything else in our information hypersphere, this story did not
have much staying power. Trump’s attempt to blow up the
constitutional order has become old news. Ho-hum. He got away with
this allegedly criminal act because he won the election. His pardons
of the violent criminals who attacked hundreds of cops is just one
item on a long list of outrages that quickly come and go.

A high-profile public appearance in which Smith vigorously presented
the case against Trump might not at this point change the overall
public perception of Trump’s attempted power grab and the violent
raid he triggered. But that would have drawn more attention and served
the truth. Which is why Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the
committee, and his fellow Republicans made damn sure that did not
happen.

 
Today is the fifth anniversary of January 6—a shameful day in
American history. And in the last election, the nation—or about half
of its voters—welcomed back into the house the arsonist who tried to
burn it down. The past 10 years have sadly showed us that a wannabe
authoritarian in the United States can succeed in denying reality and
wiping away history. Trump did that with the Russian attack on the
2016 election, which he aided and abetted by echoing Vladimir
Putin’s false claims that Moscow had not intervened and by insisting
ad nauseum that it was a hoax. And he has done the same with January
6, hailing it a “day of love”
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“a beautiful day”
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rioters “great patriots.”
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Many Americans, it seems, couldn’t hold on to a clear memory of
January 6 for even a few years—or couldn’t be bothered to. This
demonstrates how susceptible people can be to what the Party did
in _1984_: Erase the past (even the most recent past) and then erase
the erasure.

Trump is back in the White House, pushing his agenda of
authoritarianism far beyond what he could only dream of during his
first term. Future historians—if there is history in the
future—will wonder about much in this era. But what might puzzle
them the most is how the man who nearly annihilated our constitutional
republic was able to worm his way back into the presidency. Gore Vidal
once referred to the nation as the “United States of Amnesia.” On
this dark anniversary, it’s good to remember that Trump is in power
today because there’s been too much forgetting.

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David Corn, Mother Jones, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief

* January 6 Attack; Jack Smith
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* Special Council; Donald Trump;
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