The Battle of January 6th Has Just Begun
By Susan B. Glasser
Nine months to the day after the January 6th insurrection by a pro-Trump mob at the Capitol, I received nine statements by e-mail from the former President via his Save America Political Action Committee. In them, he attacked the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, for “folding to the Democrats, again,” by agreeing to not allow the U.S. government to default on its debts. He sent news articles about bad ratings numbers for CNN and bad polling numbers for President Biden. He complimented “the great Sean Hannity” and claimed that the “Fake News” refused to focus on the new Administration’s many screwups “on Afghanistan, Russia, Taiwan and China, the Border, inflation, and a failing economy.” But, these days, Donald Trump most of all has a message about the 2020 election—and the insurrectionists who tried to stop his defeat from being made official. His point, which he put bluntly on Wednesday, is this: “the real insurrection happened on November 3rd, the Presidential Election, not on January 6th.”
The mob was actually at the Capitol for the purpose of “protesting the Fake Election results,” Trump informed me. The House select committee investigating the events that day is the new “Witch Hunt,” he claimed, and the real evil was not the attack on Congress by a violent horde of Confederate flag-waving Trumpians but the “rigged” election, which illegitimately installed “weak and corrupt leadership” in the U.S. In fact, because of this terrible new regime “we may very well end up in a war with China who no longer respects the USA.” The “Radical Left Democrats” are “destroying our Nation,” he added. “Our Country is in big trouble—we better get going fast!” And this was all on a Wednesday in October when nothing much was going on.
I understand and sympathize with the impulse to believe that Trump is done and over with, even if he has refused to go off into the largely silent retirement from public life embraced by his predecessors. Time marches on; he’s already seventy-five years old. He’s talking about running again, but maybe—probably, hopefully—he won’t. (And loser Presidents, Grover Cleveland aside, never actually succeed in coming back.) When a new Pew Research Center poll, released this week, showed that forty-four per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents wanted Trump to run for President again in 2024, the Republican former representative Barbara Comstock, a rare Never Trump holdout, tweeted, “Most Rs realize Trump is a once and future Sore Loser. Stop fearing this dangerous and delusional man.” If only that were the case.
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But look at where our politics are, nine months after the insurrection, and they tell a radically different story. Trump is, per Pew and other recent polls, both the overwhelming favorite among Republicans for 2024 and their continuing spiritual leader. (Two-thirds of the Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that Pew surveyed wanted Trump to continue to be a major national figure, a total that’s gone up by ten points since January. Yes, that’s not a typo—it’s gone up.) Just as important, he has succeeded in selling his party on his Big Lie about the 2020 election, on January 6th revisionism, and on taking a series of specific actions—from changing how states certify elections to purging state Republican officials who did not go along with his 2020 coup attempt—that will affect American democracy for years to come, whether or not Trump runs again.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-battle-of-january-6th-has-just-begun
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