Naive?
Five years ago today, on January 6, 2021, I was on the phone with my friend Bruce while we both marveled over what was happening outside the United States Capitol Building: It was under attack by thousands of armed belligerents working to support Donald Trump’s spurious claim that the 2020 Presidential election.
(For the record: The election was not stolen, supported both by the facts of the matter and by Trump’s lifelong pattern of pathological lying.)
Bruce was upset — couldn’t believe what he was watching unfold in real time — but I was buoyant.
“This is great!” I said. “Now it’s all out in the open. Now no one can deny the truth about Trump. This will be IT for him!”
As further details came out — of officers assaulted and terribly wounded or killed, of members of Congress hiding in terror, of rampaging lunatics smashing doors and windows and shitting on the desk of the Speaker of the House, of rioters calling for the Vice President to be hanged — I felt secure that this would be the end of Trump and his movement.
I guess I was naive.
Because now, five years later, one of the worst people on the planet is right back in the White House. And I don’t need to catalog everything he’s done in just the one year he’s been back. We all already know. It’s well-documented.
How did this happen?
Well, for one thing, the then-Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, known for deploring Donald Trump, nevertheless voted to acquit him in the impeachment trial that soon followed. McConnell, by the way, excoriated Trump for January 6, and called Trump’s actions a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” But, he said, he couldn’t vote to convict Trump because of “constitutional concerns.”
I wonder how he’s feeling about the Constitution today.
McConnell thought Trump would just slink into a hidey hole in Mar-A-Lago, and perhaps he could have… except another GOP leader, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went to visit Trump and bent the knee, because he needed more support from MAGA-aligned Republicans in the House. This was only three weeks after the riot Trump staged. Trump, always alert to an opportunity, took a photo with McCarthy and sent it out, displaying for all that he still had the loyalty of Republicans in power, and instantly dubbed McCarthy “my Kevin” – because, of course, he owned him. Real profiles in courage.
Looking back, I should have expected it. Because even though these men loathed Trump and eagerly awaited the day he’d be finished, they each put their own self-interest first and they underestimated the ravenous need of Donald Trump to always “win,” even when, and especially when, everyone else loses.
I was naïve, and so were they, and so was Attorney General Merrick Garland, who played nice, and so was everyone else who thought that the usual rules applied.
And so here we are.
I share this history lesson because even though you and I know it’s true, the White House rolled out a new website today that completely mischaracterizes what happened. And by “mischaracterizes,” I mean “it lies.” Now, somehow, in their Orwellian version, law enforcement instigated the riot in which they themselves were attacked, and Nancy Pelosi, who was desperately trying not to get killed by rioters looking for her, is to blame as well.
All of this is patently false, just as everything put out by Big Brother’s totalitarian Party governing Oceania is a web of lies.
But:
The people trapped in Oceania didn’t have the Internet. And thus far, governments in our world have done an incomplete job of keeping everything off the internet. There’s always the Dark Web, and VPNs, and other ways around governmental road blocks — at least for now.
So, just as I told my kids in 2000 that the presidential election had been stolen from Al Gore, I’m doing my part to be part of a movement that says that Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election and his valorization of rioters attacking our capitol (rioters, it turns out, whose expenses his campaign paid so that they’d show up and riot) are lies. And if enough of us won’t swallow the lies — if enough of us keep spreading the truth — then we can put an end to this.
Unless, once again, I’m being naïve.