The Trouble With "January 6th"

Our shorthand for Trump's coup attempt undersells the depth of his criminality

Four years after Donald Trump’s unprecedented scheme to nullify his defeat in a presidential election and cling to power culminated in a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol, perhaps the most shocking thing about it is how little it ultimately mattered.

In a pattern that had, even then, already become depressingly familiar, an initial outpouring of outrage from elected Republicans gave way to predictable accommodation. Was impeachment really procedurally appropriate for a former president? Better to let the criminal justice system handle the matter. But then, of course, a Justice Department already once bitten by the political blowback from previous investigations of Trump dragged its heels launching a probe. When the indictments finally began rolling out, a supine Supreme Court further assisted Trump in running out the clock by fabricating a novel doctrine of presidential immunity, not only absent from but starkly at odds with the text of the Constitution. While hundreds of individual rioters and several administration officials have faced consequences for their role in the coup attempt, Trump’s reelection finally killed off any remaining hope of criminal accountability for the ringleader.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, however, is how little it seemed to matter to voters. Polls in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol Riot showed that 60 percent of the electorate thought it should disqualify Trump from holding office in the future—a number that surely should have been even higher, and presumably would have been but for a large majority of Republicans continuing to believe Trump’s conspiratorial lies about the election being stolen. By Election Day of 2024, however, many of those voters had evidently changed their minds. A scheme to seize the presidency by fraud and violence was no longer an obstacle to handing Trump the keys to the Resolute Desk for a second term. For the truest of true believers, surreally, the January 6th riots had even become something of an asset: Either another Deep State false flag operation to discredit Trump or (inconsistently, but never mind!) an excuse to throw the book at patriotic Trump supporters for glorified trespassing.

There are plenty of obvious contributors to this broad electoral indifference. Four years is a long time, and it’s hard to maintain a sense of outrage about something that didn’t personally affect you over that span, especially if you’re not particularly politically engaged. Right-wing propaganda outlets, of course, did their part, relentlessly downplaying the significance of the riot itself and treating Trumps lie about a stolen election as some kind of genuine controversy rather than the obviously groundless, desperate fabrication it was. The feckless and laggard response of the criminal justice system also, no doubt, made it easy for low-information voters to discount the coup: If Trump were truly culpable for something so egregious, why hadn’t he already faced punishment for it?

One underrated factor, however, is probably the way we collectively chose to talk about Trump’s coup attempt: “January 6th.” That single date became our shorthand for a prolonged scheme aimed at reversing the outcome of the presidential election, and was routinely employed to characterize prosecutions for conduct only tenuously connected to the riot at the Capitol.

Let’s briefly recall that larger scheme. It began almost immediately when it became clear Trump had lost, with a torrent of spurious claims that the election had been stolen. Trump indiscriminately and enthusiastically seized on any conspiracy that might bolster this notion: No theory, apparently, was too plainly ludicrous or implausible to broadcast to his millions of followers as fact. Perhaps hordes of illegal immigrants and dead people had voted. Perhaps fake ballots had been trucked in to polling centers to stuff ballot boxes. Perhaps foreign hackers had somehow tinkered with electronic voting machines or, more ominous still, perhaps those machines had been deliberately designed to enable surreptitious vote tampering.

With the base suitably—and judging by polls successfully—primed, Trump inundated the legal system with frivolous lawsuits alleging electoral improprieties, and launched the fake electors scheme, wherein loyalist delegates submitted fraudulent electoral votes, as though Trump had been victorious in states he’d lost. He sought, unsuccessfully, to have the Justice Department bolster his lies by telling Congress and state legislatures that his election rigging fantasies were credible claims under active investigation. He phoned Georgia’s Secretary of State—and for all we know others who lacked the spine to publicize the interaction—touting a series of bogus claims in an effort to strong-arm the official into “finding” thousands of additional Trump votes, ominously implying he might face prosecution if he failed to comply with Trump’s scheme.

Having worked to manufacture the false appearance of controversy over which slate of state electors were legitimate—the real ones or the fake ones his minions had submitted—Trump sought to bully Vice President Mike Pence into using this as a pretext to radically exceed his ministerial role in overseeing the certification of electoral votes by refusing to certify Biden as the legitimate victor. This, he hoped, would permit a Republican-controlled Congress to ignore the actual election results and hand him the presidency by fiat.

The Capitol Riot was the culmination and capstone of this plot—a grand public show of force calculated to intimidate a recalcitrant Pence and wavering legislators into doing Trump’s bidding. But it was also, in a sense, superfluous. The critical elements of Trump’s failed scheme to steal the presidency were all in place well before the first window was smashed. It was the preparatory work that made the riot part of an honest-to-god coup attempt, and not merely a misguided protest that turned violent. If Trump had directed the protesters to peacefully disperse rather than giddily cheering them on as they ransacked the Capitol, he would be only very slightly less culpable. The real attack on democracy had, by that point, already occurred.

Perhaps inevitably, however, the January 6th riot became a synecdoche for the whole elaborate scheme. It was a singular event that had glued the country to their televisions, radios, and news feeds, producing a welter of shocking and memorable imagery. And unlike frivolous lawsuits, far-fetched conspiracies about cyberattacks, or electoral certification machinations, imagery of angry people smashing stuff needs no explanation. It was the element of Trump’s plot so viscerally appalling that even normally reliable Republicans recoiled and denounced it. And, of course, talking about “January 6th”—an objectively verifiable event—was, for the press, more attractively neutral than talking about “Trump’s coup attempt,” which might open them to accusations of bias against disingenuous schemes to overturn election results.

In hindsight, that compression of the coup into a single date and event helped to undermine the public’s sense of how serious and dangerous it was. The riot in itself, after all, risked property damage and injury, but not control of the Executive Branch: Only the in the context of Trump’s preperatory work could it be seen as a genuine threat to democratic institutions. It was also the element of the plot in which Trump enjoyed the greatest deniability, at least for a disengaged low-information voter inclined to rationalize it away. After all he didn’t explicitly order them to invade the Capitol and assault police officers, right? Didn’t he even utter the word “peaceful” at some point? While his inaction as the riot unfolded—hours during which he could have halted the assault with a tweet—should make it obvious he welcomed the violence he’d inspired, he can at least distance himself from the worst conduct of his supporters more credibly than he can wash his hands of the preceding elements of the scheme.

The unfortunate result is that a lot of inattentive voters never really internalized—or allowed themselves to conveniently forget—the real gravity of Trump’s attempt to seize power. They will stare blankly, if not snort incredulously, at references to Trump’s “coup attempt”: January 6th was just a one-off event, a single afternoon on which some rowdy supporters got out of hand. Regrettable, perhaps, but no more a threat to democracy than any number of other protests that turn destructive.

None of this is to say the election necessarily would have gone any differently if we’d collectively opted to talk about Trump’s coup in those terms. But I am confident that, perhaps paradoxically, reducing that coup attempt to its most viscerally shocking manifestation helped many voters discount its seriousness.