The insurrectionary spirit of January 6 infuses the second Trump Administration
Both the attack on Venezuela and the killing of Renee Good can be traced back to the president's embrace of lawlessness and violence unforgettably revealed five years ago
With the five-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection come and gone this week, we should all do what we can to maintain the memory and significance of that day, against the determined efforts of the the president and MAGA to whitewash their attempted coup. As I’ve written before, Trump’s insurrectionary efforts in 2020-21 — including not just the violence of January 6, but accompanying months-long efforts to subvert the election results in states like Georgia by illegal means — provide a skeleton key for understanding the fundamental reality of the president and the larger reactionary movement that he serves, and that in turn supports his quest for personal power. In a chilling act of propagandistic legerdemain, the president and his allies have used the myth of a stolen election and their own failed coup attempt — following, to be clear, Americans’ 2020 rejection of their rancid white nationalism — as an excuse to demolish democracy and impose a reactionary vision of American society on their enemies.
In this vein, I commend to the reader David Kurtz’s concise January 6 retrospective at Talking Points Memo. Kurtz has consistently been a clear-eyed observer of the aftermath of the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election results, tracings its ramifications over the past several years as MAGA has worked to re-write the events of that day. These two paragraph are particularly sharp:
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.
As Kurtz says, the country reached a fork in the road on January 6 — and this fork involved a revelation that Trump and MAGA were not merely trying to force the U.S. into a far-right trajectory, but in fact were dedicated enemies of American democracy, not just willing but eager to replace our form of government with openly authoritarian rule. Seeking to overturn election results was indistinguishable from overturning American democracy; and I strongly suspect the misrule that would have followed a successful coup by Trump would look very close to what we are seeing in his second term, as we very much live in a state of continued and escalating MAGA insurrection.
This desire to subvert our democracy grows both out of preference and necessity. As a fundamentally white supremacist, Christian nationalist movement, MAGA simply lacks the numbers for anything like a sustained majority to support its backwards views, which makes majority rule an enemy to be subverted or overcome. And in Donald Trump, millions of voters have found that they prefer a strongman leader who will abuse their common enemies and even break the law to protect his base of “real” Americans. All is justified by the idea that by returning America to a mythical past — when women were women, men were men, blacks and other minorities knew their place, and ordinary people deferred to the authority of their social and financial betters — America will be made great again, even if the effort bends and breaks the contemporary United States beyond recognition.
The insurrection that day has ended up being a template leading straight through to the ongoing attack on American democracy and society. It never ended, but became disguised beneath the appearance of legitimacy and popular support. But even Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 did not give him any legitimate authority for what has transpired over the last year: a vast array of illegality meant to replace our constitutional form of government with one-party domination, all while serving the limitless desire for wealth of the president and his fellow oligarchs. This is not a clash over policy issues (though that is certainly part of it), but over what sort of government we will have and what sort of country we will be. A democracy, or a dictatorship? A free society where all are considered equal under the law, or a deeply hierarchical society where the government acts to enforce life possibilities and rights based on the color of one’s skin, one’s gender, and one’s religious beliefs? Trump’s continued resort to insurrectionary means — the knee-jerk resort to illegal and anti-constitutional acts — intends to ensure that this not a fair fight, but one in which authoritarian rule is cemented by a series of illegitimate actions both great and small.
On this dark anniversary, I wanted to end with two particular observations that highlight not just the danger but some reasons for hope in our post-January 6, Trump II reality. First: as chilling as MAGA’s continued work to erase the reality of January 6 can feel, I continue to believe that this obsessive work not only will fail against the well-documented reality that we collectively experienced — and felt in our gut — but that the cover-up will itself end up helping defeat this movement. The latest effort is both chilling and laughable: a White House website that flips the reality of January 6 on its head. Here’s how Mother Jones’ David Corn describes some of its contents:
The site hails Trump for issuing “sweeping blanket pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 patriotic Americans” who were in the mob that assaulted the Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. The site denounces Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the House select committee that investigated the riot for having fabricated “an ‘insurrection’ narrative” and pinning “all blame” on Trump.
This site is loaded with absurd falsehoods about January 6. It maintains that the “Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump…In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.” And it presents an utterly phony timeline of the day, asserting that when peaceful “patriots” marched to the Capitol, police officers responded with “provocative tactics” and “violent force” that “turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos”—and that Trump repeatedly called for calm. None of that is true. In fact, once the melee began, 187 minutes passed before Trump urged his supporters to withdraw from the Capitol.
I like to think that the alternate, mendacious history Trump and his allies try so hard to tell is tantamount to placing a volatile bomb at the center of its claims to righteous, vengeful rule. Attempting against all evidence to paint the police as bad guys, seditionist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as heroes, and unforgettable violence as a gentle stroll through the halls of Congress, Trump and MAGA aim for a reversal of good and evil that ends up highlighting this movement’s essential depravity. You could say that their keen awareness of their high crimes drives them to obsessively seek to scrub them away — yet this scrubbing is just more evidence of their criminality. And to the credit of many pro-democracy actors, from reporters to Democratic politicians, there in fact has been decent coverage, and debunking, of this ongoing effort.
Second, we can draw a direct line between January 6 and the two events that have dominated politics this past week: Donald Trump’s decision to attack Venezuela, and ICE’s slaying of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. At a high level, they represent the logical conclusion of a presidency based in lawlessness and violence, and for which January 6 provided the essential template for Trump’s approach to governance upon any return to power. And between the invasion and the murder, we can better grasp the full consequences of Trump’s continued insurrection against the United States.
With Venezuela, Donald Trump and MAGA have taken their impulse to dominate global, so that we have arrived at the surreal spectacle of the man whose goal is to overturn American democracy literally deposing the president of another country, not in service of U.S. influence but of his own corrupt dreams of power and enrichment. In defiance of international and American laws, violence was again the method for exerting illegitimate power, though on a stage far larger than the grounds of the U.S. Capitol building. The journey from January 6 is staggering but informative.
Five years ago, Donald Trump betrayed his role as commander in chief by refusing to order the National Guard to defend the Capitol, and instead egged on the rampaging crowd, serving as the de facto generalissimo of an invading army. Now, tragically, Trump is again commander in chief, and once again betraying his responsibilities by ordering the American military to coerce a sovereign nation into economic subservience: already, he has indicated he will personally manage some Venezuelan oil proceeds and that Venezuela has “agreed” to buy American products, all at the point of a gun.
In Minneapolis, the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent on Wednesday also demonstrates the progression of the insurrection that began on January 6. Five years on, with an unrepentant Trump back in power, his violence has been re-directed from attacking the Capitol to harming Americans deemed in defiance of his outlaw regime. Where a loose band of right-wing extremists and other malcontents served as the president’s foot soldiers on January 6, now ICE forms Trump’s own personal paramilitary force; it not only abuses immigrants in the administration’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the nation, but sweeps up, injures, and even kills Americans in what increasingly appears to be a deliberate strategy of political intimidation against U.S. citizens. As New Republic’s Greg Sargent put it, “MAGA can obfuscate all they want, but here’s the bottom line: Their grand project of flooding our cities with armed government militias and pouring resources into mass ethnic purification makes such shootings far more likely. That’s a feature, not a bug.”
Moreover, as others have pointed out, the same propagandistic instinct to re-write January 6 was immediately at play in the administration’s response to the Good shooting. The administration has worked to invert the reality of her killing, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeling her a terrorist, and multiple administration officials disseminating lies about the shooting clearly contradicted by video of the incident (such as President Trump’s claim that she ran over an ICE agent).
And as David Corn sharply observes, threaded throughout the administration response to the Good killing is an assertion also central to its continued lies around January 6 and in its attack on Venezuela: that “Violence is ours to use, at home and abroad, to get what we want.” In the commitment to violence to rule and intimidate opponents, we may find the clearest, most dangerous line from January 6 to the present day: an administration that views the American people as an enemy to be harmed and conquered, not a citizenry to which it is ultimately accountable and subordinate, and that sees violence as the ultimate trump card for getting what it wants. The key issue for the American majority — an issue that broke into undeniable view five years ago — is how to retain our democracy against a minority willing to kill its fellow Americans to get its way.
But both the Good murder, as well as the Venezuela action also help make Trump’s authoritarianism more legible and objectionable to ordinary Americans. With his Latin American neo-colonialism, the president is implicating our country in the very sort of complicated foreign intervention most people thought he was against; acting so purely on his own initiative and in his own personal interest, he is vulnerable to a public revulsion against his defiance of Congress’ war-making powers. And by making the specter of state violence against the citizenry so explicit and unavoidable, Trump may well be pushing the country into a decisive awareness of the danger we face, and cultivating a backlash that could constitute, if not the end of his presidency, then the beginning of the end.