Peter Baker: A Year Later, Jan. 6 Becomes Just Another Wedge in a Divided Nation

Today, it has become heresy among conservatives to question Mr. Trump’s legacy. The cabinet secretaries and White House aides who resigned in protest of his role in the violence now largely keep to themselves. Many corporations that vowed to halt donations to Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the election have quietly reopened the contribution spigot. The congressional Republicans who angrily denounced the president after their headquarters was invaded have gone silent or even made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, all but pretending it never happened…

While nearly three-quarters of all Americans view the storming of the Capitol as an assault on democracy, about half of Republicans say the rioters were actually the ones ‘protecting democracy’ and nearly as many think the attack was not even that violent. While most Americans believe Mr. Biden was elected legitimately, seven in 10 Republicans think otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-riot-aftermath.html

Rebecca Solnit: Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

When called upon to believe that Barack Obama was really born in Kenya, millions got in line. When encouraged to believe that the 2012 Sandy Hook murder of 20 children and six adults was a hoax, too many stepped up. When urged to believe that Hillary Clinton was trafficking children in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor with no basement, they bought it, and one of them showed up in the pizza place with a rifle to protect the kids. The fictions fed the frenzies, and the frenzies shaped the crises of 2020 and 2021. The delusions are legion: Secret Democratic cabals of child abusers, millions of undocumented voters, falsehoods about the Covid-19 pandemic and the vaccine.

While much has been said about the moral and political stance of people who support right-wing conspiracy theories, their gullibility is itself alarming. Gullibility means malleability and manipulability. We don’t know if the people who believed the prevailing 2012 conspiracy theories believed the 2016 or 2020 versions, but we do know that a swath of the conservative population is available for the next delusion and the one after that. And on Jan. 6, 2021, we saw that a lot of them were willing to act on those beliefs. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/republicans-trump-lies.html

Dana Milbank: On Jan. 6 anniversary, Republicans plumb new depths

Exactly a year earlier, in and around the House chamber, Republicans and Democrats hid together, on the floor, behind chairs and under desks, as outnumbered police, guns drawn, kept President Donald Trump’s mob at bay.

Yet out of that shared trauma came one of the most divisive acts in American political history.

Republican lawmakers spent most of the next 364 days trying to erase any trace of the and Trump’s role in it. They opposed impeachment, they opposed an independent commission, they opposed (then sabotaged and boycotted) an investigative committee, and they embraced as gospel Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

Even after that record of ruin, Republicans somehow managed to plumb new depths on Thursday’s first anniversary of the insurrection. The House convened to hold a moment of silence for the police officers who one year ago saved democracy — and lawmakers’ lives — and who died in the attack’s aftermath. Republicans boycotted this, too.

By shunning Thursday’s commemoration of the Jan. 6 attack, Republican leaders, as usual, left a vacuum that let the wing nuts speak for the party. Trumpian Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced that they would give “a Republican response,” on the Jan. 6 anniversary, and in the absence of any other Republican response, theirs became the Republican response.

“We did not want the Republican voice to go unheard, and we did not want today’s historical narrative to be hijacked by those who were the true insurrectionists,” Gaetz said. And so, in a meeting room in the Cannon House Office Building, two flights up from where Democratic lawmakers were at the same time recalling their personal horrors from Jan. 6, the duo spent 37 minutes telling reporters that Jan. 6 was a “fed-surrection,” a plot perpetrated by the FBI. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/06/jan-6-anniversary-republicans-plumb-new-depths/

Eugene Robinson: Biden’s Jan. 6 speech sets the stage for a battle for truth and democracy

Largely ignoring Trump hasn’t weakened his hold on the GOP. The defeated former president must be treated like any other bully: You have to stand up to him.Trump and his allies will continue to claim that telling the truth about Jan. 6 is some kind of partisan political ploy. It is not. More than 140 police officers were injured in the melee. Several officers later died. An insurrectionist was shot as the mob breached the Capitol. The nation was traumatized. And none of this would have happened if Trump had not illegally tried to cling to power by overturning the will of 81 million voters.

Biden has to lead the fight for truth and democracy. Losing is not an option. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/06/bidens-jan-6-speech-sets-stage-battle-truth-democracy/

Adam Schiff: A year after the Capitol attack, democracy itself is on every ballot

Fingers to the wind, McCarthy, McConnell and state and local GOP leaders decided that Donald Trump really could, if not shoot someone in the middle of the street with impunity, at least incite a violent attack on our democracy and retain the support of his base. Lacking the courage of their convictions, guided by nothing more than their ambition to regain power, the GOP leadership buckled again to the former president.” https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-06/adam-schiff-jan-6-anniversary-capitol-attack-and-aftermath

Dan Pfeiffer: The Next Insurrection is Coming

“January 6th was practice” has become a rallying cry for the Right. As Bart Gellman ominously wrote in The Atlantic:

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

The fact Republicans are moving ahead with a plan to steal the election in 2024 without fear of consequence is frightening and depressing. The political winds heading into the midterms are at their backs. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain more interested in protecting their centrist credentials than American democracy. Too much of the political media has normalized election theft as a legitimate political strategy in a fruitless attempt to avoid accusations of bias. https://messagebox.substack.com/p/stopping-the-next-insurrection-starts

George T. Conway III: Trump must have his day in court for Jan. 6

Trump’s intent was obvious well before Jan. 6. I tweeted on Dec. 26, 2020, “It’s pretty clear now that Donald Trump’s next desperate play is to encourage disruption, if not violence, in Washington on January 6.” I wasn’t being prescient; I had just listened to what Trump had been saying. As Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in announcing her vote to impeach, “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.” He did it all in plain sight.

So now the question is, will the Justice Department hold Trump responsible for his role in the attack? If Garland truly means that perpetrators at any level will be held accountable, and that “there cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless,” then the department can, it should, and it must.

Garland must not fear that prosecuting Trump would be viewed as a partisan act. He need only look to the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who, after voting against an impeachment conviction on the (meritless) ground that Trump had left office, all but called for Trump’s prosecution. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” McConnell said. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” McConnell added. “He didn’t get away with anything yet. Yet.”

The Justice Department has plenty of statutory tools available to make sure Trump doesn’t get away with what he did. Most notably, it could invoke one of the same provisions it has applied to individual rioters: Title 18, section 1512(c)(2) of the U.S. Code punishes “whoever corruptly … obstructs … or impedes any official proceeding.” The statute makes clear that an “official proceeding” includes one “before the Congress.” At least one judge handling Jan. 6 cases has already held that it includes Congress’s joint session for counting electoral votes.

That Trump himself wasn’t present at the Capitol doesn’t shield him from liability for obstructing the electoral vote count or for any other crimes committed that day. The criminal code provides that whoever “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” the commission of an offense, or “willfully causes … another” to commit an offense, “is punishable as a principal," as though they had directly committed the deed himself.

A number of criminal law experts have noted that you can aid and abet a crime simply by doing nothing — if you have a duty to intervene but don’t. A bystander who watches a store break-in and does nothing hasn’t committed a crime. The store security guard who sees the break-in and does nothing, knowing that his dereliction is allowing the crime to proceed, has.

As president, Trump had the duty to intervene. Instead, as the Jan. 6 select congressional committee is learning, he spent hours watching the mayhem on TV. And that dereliction of duty, along with his open and manifest desire to stop the electoral-vote count, should suffice to make him guilty of a crime. The evidence is already bad for him, and it can only get worse.

If the attorney general means what he says, Trump’s day in the dock will come — if not soon, then soon enough. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/05/trump-must-have-his-day-court-his-crimes-jan-6/

Susan Glasser: Biden, Back Into the Breach

He never mentioned Donald Trump by name. He didn’t have to. Joe Biden gave the speech of his Presidency on Thursday—the first anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol that Trump inspired and incited. In unsparing terms rarely uttered by one leader of the United States about another, Biden castigated the man he referred to sixteen times only as “the former President.” Trump, he said, was not just “a former President”—he’s “a defeated former President.” He “created and spread a web of lies” about the 2020 election. He put his “bruised ego” over the Constitution and the country. He and his followers, in attacking the peaceful transfer of power, “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy.”

The Biden who showed up in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall on Thursday bristled with righteous outrage about the rioters who, a year earlier, had paraded Confederate flags there, who had kicked and hit and stomped on police, who had even defecated in the corridors, as they sought to stop the certification of Trump’s defeat. He fact-checked the absurd lies of Republicans who called the insurrection just another tourist outing. And, returning to the theme that animated his 2020 campaign, Biden described the “battle for the soul of America” that Trump and his followers have unloosed, and which is still being joined a year later. “I will stand in the breach,” Biden vowed. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/joe-biden-back-into-the-breach

Matt Johnson: Jan. 6th Changed How the World Sees America

The United States isn’t going to regain its standing as an exemplary democracy any time soon. Even if global perceptions stabilize over the next few years, the specter of Trump’s return to the biggest stage in American politics will remain ever-present—refusing to convict him for his role in fomenting the insurrection was one thing, but what if the GOP rewards him with another presidential nomination?

What effect will the widespread acquiescence in (and the active propagation of) his lies about the 2020 election have on the Republican party’s commitment to American democracy? How certain can America’s allies (or enemies) be that Trumpism won’t continue to dominate the Republican party even long after Trump has gone? https://www.thebulwark.com/jan-6-changed-how-world-sees-america-trump-coup/

Sam Rosenfeld: Democracy is on the brink of disaster. For voters, it’s politics as usual.

Worries about the state of American democracy didn’t begin when Trump rejected the election’s results — indeed, they predate his entrance into politics. For the last two decades, analysts have connected dysfunction in governance to deepening party polarization, marked by an asymmetrical Republican shift toward procedural hardball and extremism. Trump’s rise both extended and accelerated a disturbing trend. When he trafficked in authoritarian rhetoric and brazenly mixed personal and public power — while steadily consolidating the loyalty of his party — analysts portrayed it as a lesson in “How Democracies Die” and “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy.” As nearly 200 scholars with relevant expertise warned last summer: “Our entire democracy is now at risk.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/07/democracy-threat-voters-politics/

Colin P. Clarke: The newest variant of violent extremism? Using paranoia about the pandemic as a recruiting tool

For anti-government and anti-authority extremists, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a godsend. In many ways, it seems almost tailor-made for anti-government propaganda, exerting an almost magnetic pull on conspiracy theorists and other far-right extremists. The Omicron variant sweeping the globe has made vaccine mandates a global talking point, which has led a paranoid and growing fringe of extremists to threaten violence against healthcare workers, scientists and government officials in countries around the world.

The pandemic is essentially serving as a gateway drug for violent extremists to dabble in new ideologies and conspiracies. The anti-vaxxer movement could end up serving as a conveyor belt that delivers new members to other extremist groups, including militias and racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist organizations.

Anti-vaxxers have found common ground with conspiracy theorists, including QAnon adherents, as well as far-right extremists in general, particularly anti-government extremists who perceive every move by the federal government as tyrannical. Social media has also played a significant role by helping to bring individuals together for protests — and giving radicals a tool to spread disinformation that brings new recruits into the movement. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-09/covid-vaccines-paranoia-recruiting-extremists-terrorism