The Normalization of January 6 - Horowitz

The Normalization of January 6 - Horowitz

"The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!,” former President Trump wrote several weeks ago in a statement timed to respond to the House of Representatives moving forward with a vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for disregarding a subpoena from the “House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol” compelling his testimony.

Mr. Trump’s blatant inversion of reality pithily encapsulates his falsehood-riddled effort to redefine January 6 as an understandable reaction by patriots to the stealing of an American election.  In this shameful campaign to replace the plain truth with brazen propaganda, Mr. Trump continues to receive aid and comfort from his allies in the media and to be enabled by the nodding and winking -if not outright agreement-- of a large group of Republican elected officials, nearly all of whom know better.

Since January 6, Tucker Carlson, for example, has used his highly rated prime time Fox News show to downplay and dismiss the insurrection and its violence with choice descriptions, such as recently remarking that the Jan. 6 rioters “don’t look like terrorists — they look like tourists,” charging again that “they were not insurrectionists,” as The Washington Post reported.  He is now upping the ante with a three-part series, entitled Patriot Purge, that begins streaming on Fox Nation this week.  Among other misleading and outright false claims, the series gives credence to charges that January 6 was a so-called false flag operation.

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While not all active Trump supporters in the media go as far on Carlson, even the ones that do concede it was a riot with unacceptable behavior, then minimize it by separating the events of the day from its political context.  A tweet by Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at “The Federalist,” a pro-Trump publication, and frequent Fox News contributor,  provides a good illustration of this technique:  “People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” Hemingway tweeted this summer as noted by Deadline.  Simply put, January 6 was a violent attempt to disrupt the normally routine certification of an American Presidential election by Congress conducted by people who were egged on and encouraged by President Trump’s repeated and virulent false claims that the election was stolen.

Unfortunately, this shameless effort to erase or at least obscure the meaning and reality of January 6, propelled by President Trump and his allies, is persuading some Republicans.  While for the overwhelming majority of Americans, January 6 is viewed as of increasing importance as more is learned about the events of that day and the planning leading up to it, there has been “a 22 percentage point drop in the share of Republicans who think it is very or somewhat important that federal law enforcement agencies find and prosecute those who broke into and rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” since March, according to a Pew Research Group national survey.

This drop is especially pronounced among the “two-thirds of Republicans who believe that Trump definitely or probably won the 2020 presidential election.”  Only about 1-in-5 Republicans who believe that Trump won the presidential election, “say that it is very important that federal law enforcement agencies find and prosecute the individuals who broke into and rioted at the U.S. capitol on Jan. 6.”

As the House select committee continues to ramp up its activities and more damaging details emerge about the former president and his close advisers’ efforts to overturn a presidential election, the central role of blocking the certification of the vote on January 6 to their plans, and the role of close Trump allies in the financing and organizing of the insurrection, I expect Trump’s propaganda campaign to only increase in intensity and outrageousness.  And his propaganda efforts will likely be able to prevent the continuing accretion of facts that will make Trump’s claims about the election itself and about January 6 seem even more fanciful from shaking the beliefs of his core supporters.  But as more information surfaces over the next few months, the rest of the nation-- which remains the overwhelming majority-- are likely to be even more persuaded of the fundamental threat to democracy posed by Trump’s actions leading up to January 6 and on that day, and the ongoing threat his continued false claims about the election and attempts to normalize January 6 pose to our democratic values.

The words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, delivered more than 8 months ago, right after he voted to acquit the former president on narrow jurisdictional grounds, have more than stood the test of time: “The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, "said the Senate Republican Leader. “And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.”

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.