It has never been easy for me to write about January 6.
Even standing in the crowd that day to cover the chaos, I found that sending out the first reports was a struggle. First, thanks to the sheer mass of the raging mob or perhaps some heavy law enforcement tech, the internet was jammed. It was a challenge to send out videos and posts documenting what was happening in front of me. But, along with dealing with those concrete logistics, I had to overcome the sheer disbelief. Was I really seeing people climbing the walls? Were Nick Fuentes Groyper flags really hanging from the windows of the U.S. Capitol? What had happened to the police?
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.
In the immediate aftermath, I found it hard to capture the scope of the thing. As an eyewitness and a journalist, I felt a distinct burden. I had to convey not just how far we’d strayed from any notion of law and order but also the horror of how much more violent it very easily could have been.
That urgency became a dull weight as it quickly began to seem that so much of the country was eager to move on or ignore the harsh truths of the day. The tendency of many to look away and pass into the ultimately interstitial, liminal moment of Joe Biden’s presidency was exacerbated by the fact there was a full-on campaign dedicated to rewriting and reversing the basic facts of what happened. The attack on our government was quickly paired with an assault on our collective memory that painted the day as, alternately, harmless, a set up, or even heroic. The task of these propagandists was made even easier because so much of Official Washington demonstrated an unwillingness to identify and punish the members of Congress, assorted grifters, and dark money groups that formed the political arm of the January 6 movement.
Like so many other investigators, attorneys, and whistleblowers, I swam against this tide for years. Along with other journalists, including here at TPM, I dutifully tried to fact check the most egregious lies, to expose the many direct lines between the rioters on the ground and President Trump, and even to release evidence that the official probes failed to publicly present. On other dark anniversaries, I also tried to counter the blatantly, ridiculously false narrative that this was some kind of peaceful and positive protest by recounting the terror I felt in that crowd. Ultimately, those efforts failed. The narrative, at least for now, has been fully and dramatically rewritten with Trump’s pardon pen.
January 6 wasn’t the first tragedy of the Trump era. By the time he spurred the crowds to surge towards the Capitol, the president had already presided over child separation and a shambolic pandemic response that left countless dead. It also, clearly, was not the last Trumpian outrage. His second term has seen systematic dismantling of the federal workforce, the fraying of the social fabric, and the subversion of the nation’s longstanding legal traditions. The rule of masked agents has taken over in the courts.
It showed the stunning level to which Trump and his allies were willing to disregard democracy and their almost limitless, utter shameless capacity to lie. It also revealed the degree to which they had mobilized the internet’s most extreme subcultures to — in some cases literally — break through every last barricade protecting our democratic traditions.
Still, all these years after the word “unprecedented” has essentially lost all meaning, the Capitol attack feels like a moment when a very particular line was crossed. It showed the stunning level to which Trump and his allies were willing to disregard democracy and their almost limitless, utter shameless capacity to lie. It also revealed the degree to which they had mobilized the internet’s most extreme subcultures to — in some cases literally — break through every last barricade protecting our democratic traditions. And the aftermath proved how many of our checks and balances have essentially checked out.
Within the past week, Trump’s violent and often absurd assaults on the old order have gone international in a new way with his invasion of Venezuela, kidnapping of that country’s dictator, and declaration America will now be seizing the oil fields and running the show there. As ever, it shows no signs of stopping, with similar threats now ramping up against Greenland and Mexico. It’s hard for me not to think there’s a throughline between the excesses of that day and the current military spree.
January 6 was, for me, the moment we lost the plot. It was a milestone in the erosion of our core values. It left Trump’s violent authoritarian movement emboldened and able to continue onward. The gates were forced open.
Many observers have looked at Trump’s actions in Venezuela and argued they are simply a more blatant version of an age-old American imperialism. They’re not wrong. Yet, somehow, Trump manages to take our country’s worst tendencies and magnify them to an absurd degree.
As I once again found myself faced with this anniversary and struggling to get the right words out about January 6, I sought inspiration from one of the old greats, Hunter S. Thompson. I pulled out his Gonzo Papers and happened upon a 1990 column where he assessed the legacy of Richard Nixon. Thompson recounted how, in a 1974 op-ed, he tried to skewer the grossest tendencies of political class by floating what he described as an admittedly “tongue-in-cheek” and “outlandish scenario” where the country would address its issues in the Middle East by “just seizing the oil” in the Middle East. Soon after, Thompson noted the Nixon administration turned what he thought had been a far-fetched vision of “invading the Middle East to seize the Arab oil” into “a definite policy option.”
“Nixon was a monument to everything rotten in the American dream — he was a monument to why it failed,” Thompson wrote. “He is our monument.”
Of course, in the years after Thompson published that piece, the idea of an oil-driven invasion became a reality. Nixon, in hindsight, becomes an early innovator of brazen ideas Trump is taking in absurd new directions.
Trump and his gilded, misshapen White House are monuments to the fevered night sweats that have shaken us from the American dream. He is our monument — and January 6 is his national holiday.
