Programming note: Our first Morning Memo Live event is coming up on Jan. 29 in Washington, D.C. Find details and tickets here.
A Fork in the Road of American History
TPM has never much indulged the lazy-editor trope of anniversary coverage of major events, but in the midst of a fierce rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, it feels fitting to mark its fifth anniversary, if only to preserve clarity amongst ourselves about what that day represents: the starkest fork in the road that this country had faced since its civil war.
Jan. 6 felt that momentous then, not just as a culmination of the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, but a clear and present choice about what path the country would take from there. Not an end point, as I argued at the time, but a dangerous new starting point that threatened us with a dark and uncertain future in which democracy and the rule of law would succumb to lawlessness, tyranny, and a uniquely American brand of authoritarianism.
The results of the 2024 election made clear which fork we took, and so we now remember the attack on the Capitol not as a mere warning sign or as a glorious moment when democracy bent but did not break but rather as a last chance to avoid a calamitous path that has taken us over a cliff. We haven’t hit bottom yet.
I offer this brief reflection not as a jolt of doomerism but because, even in my own mind, the relentlessness of American exceptionalism in which we’ve been drenched all our lives continues to be the default setting. On good days, that manifests as a certain kind of optimism and can-do spirit that we’ll get through this. On bad days, it’s a deep denial of how far we’ve already fallen. Either way, our national penchant for self-congratulation is a bad prism through which to view our present circumstances.
Looking Back Five Years on …
- TPM’s Hunter Walker, who was outside the Capitol that day: “The stunning realization of just how out of control things had become stalled me out for a second. My mind raced to process what was playing out in front of me. I don’t think I have ever fully returned to the state of reality I had prior to those insane scenes. I don’t think any of us have.”
- Former TPMer Igor Bobic, who captured historic video footage of the attack from inside the Capitol, is among those featured in a new oral history of Jan. 6: “I remember opening my iPhone camera and debating for the briefest second, as I’m sprinting down these marble stairs, whether I should put it in video or photo. Because I knew that we’re not allowed to take videos in the halls. In that split second, I kept it on the video camera.”
- Former TPMer Ryan Reilly, who has become the leading journalist on the Jan. 6 attack: “Five years after he and his allies tried and failed to overturn the results of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump is using his time back in the White House to take a series of actions aimed at erasing or rewriting the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the U.S. Capitol, with more likely to come.”
- Politico’s Kyle Cheney: “Jan. 6 remains crucial to understanding Trump’s second presidency, as much as it helped define his first. The ethos of Trump’s second term was forged in the final days of his first.”
- AP: The ongoing struggles of police officers who defended the Capitol are compounded by the revisionist history of Jan. 6.
- AP: “Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.”
Trump May Have Pardoned the Jan. 6 Pipe Bomber
President Trump’s sweeping pardon of Jan. 6 offenders may have included the pipe bomber, and prosecutors have gone out of their way to avoid using phrases that connect the accused to the other events of that day.
Meanwhile, the case against Brian Cole Jr. is caught up in another dispute over whether federal prosecutors can use D.C. superior court grand juries to bring indictments in D.C. federal district court. Cole has appealed to a district judge the decision by a magistrate judge conditionally “accepting” the indictment.
You’ll recall that in a separate case last year U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ultimately ruled that the law allows such a move, but he stayed his order while the defendant appealed. That appeal is still pending. The earlier case was especially suspect because federal prosecutors got no-billed by a federal court grand jury before going to the superior court grand jury, an end-run around a bad outcome.
In Cole’s case, there hasn’t been a no-true bill, and prosecutors argue that they used a superior court grand jury simply because no federal court grand juries were available over the holidays.
Quote of the Day
“We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”–deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller
The Destruction: Vaccines Edition
The sweeping new changes to the childhood vaccine schedule — reducing the number of recommended shots from 17 to 11 — represent the most radical of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax orthodoxy, as the NYT reports in unsparing style:
- “The new schedule circumvents the detailed and methodical evidence-based process that has underpinned vaccine recommendations in the nation for decades.”
- “Public health experts expressed outrage at the sweeping revisions, saying federal officials did not present evidence to support the changes or incorporate input from vaccine experts.”
In some tangentially related good news, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld a lower court ruling blocking the Trump administration from unilaterally cutting cornerstone funding for much of the countries scientific and medical research.
The Destruction: CPB Shuts Down
After a decades’ long quest, Republicans have succeeded in shutting down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose board voted yesterday to close up shop after the GOP Congress zeroed out its funding last year.
2026 Ephemera
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) reversed course and will not seek a record third term.
An Inauspicious Start
New CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s first broadcast ushered in the Bari Weiss era — and was bumpy in more glaring ways, too:
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