Trump and the January 6 Memory Hole

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The way Donald Trump talks about January 6 has evolved over time. Directly after the insurrection, he condemned the rioters, although he added that they were “very special.” For the next few years, he played around with different themes, implying that the protests were peaceful or that the people jailed for their actions that day were “political prisoners.”

But these descriptions are mild compared with the outrageous ways he’s been talking about January 6 in these weeks leading up to the election. Recently, he described the day as “love and peace” and upped the metaphor from political prisoners to Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Why is he leaning so hard into the political revisionism? And what exactly should we be afraid of?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who has a unique view of that day. Raskin explains what January 6, 2025, might look like and what is historically unique about Trump’s claims. And I ask Raskin the question I’ve been pondering: When might it be appropriate to let January 6 go?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Over the last many months, I’ve been thinking a lot about January 6 and about how memory can become a weapon in an election. Just the other day at an economic forum in Chicago, candidate Donald Trump described that day as “love and peace.” Love and peace! Can you imagine? You wanna hear some sounds of “love and peace” from that day?

[Noises from January 6]

Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.

Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.

Rosin: In the last couple of weeks of the campaign, Trump has been really digging into this bizarre sentiment. He compared the jailed rioters to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II. He reposted a meme, saying January 6 would go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up a fraudulent election. He said, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns.”

Now, if you follow the work of Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who was on this show just last week, you know what it means when a leader starts to rewrite history in such a shameless way. It’s a thing that wannabe dictators do and have always done.

But January 6 has also been on my mind because, for the past year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with people who are hard at work doing what Trump has been doing—distorting our memories of that day.

It started like this: Last fall, my partner and I were walking our dogs, and we passed a car in our neighborhood that had a bunch of militia stickers in the back window and a huge j4j6, which means “Justice for January 6ers.” And at first, we had a nasty altercation with the person in the car. And then we decided to get to know her and her friends.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you want to know how that attempt to get to know our neighbors worked out, you’ll have to listen to the podcast series we made about it. It’s called We Live Here Now.

This episode is about the bigger picture. We, in the U.S., have not had a lot of experience with this kind of real-time memory distortion. And there’s only one person I want to talk to about how that might play out in this upcoming election: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was a member of Congress’s January 6 committee, and his memories of that day are more potent than most people’s. Raskin’s son, Tommy, had died by suicide about a week before, and in the months of sleepless nights that followed Raskin wrote a book called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which interweaves his son’s suffering with the nation’s suffering, which he believes drove thousands of people to the Capitol that day.

I started by asking Raskin what was foremost on my mind, which is what we should expect this coming January 6, 2025, which is when Congress will certify the next election. Here’s our conversation.

Jamie Raskin: I mean, I’ve been to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado—and everybody is asking about January 6 and whether we will see a repeat.

But we will not see an exact repeat of January 6, 2021. For one thing, Donald Trump’s not president. Joe Biden’s president, which means, if you had a similar scenario unfolding, the National Guard would be there. Joe Biden would not be eating hamburgers and french fries and watching it on TV like an all-pro-wrestling match.

Rosin: And saying, So what?

Raskin: And saying, So what? And in general, we are physically fortified in a way we weren’t. We will have nonscalable fencing, and we’ll be ready for violence like that. But fundamentally, what was January 6, 2021? It was a certification crisis. It was an attempt to block the receipt of Electoral College votes in the so-called certificates of ascertainment sent in by the governors.

And we will see multiple certification challenges by Donald Trump, because they’ve already begun, in essence. They’re already suing. But it won’t happen at the end of the process, which is what January 6 is. They will happen at the beginning. They will be at the precinct level, at the county level, at the state level. They will try to dispute the authenticity and the veracity of the vote, and there will be challenges to, you know, any popular-vote majorities. And I’m assuming and hoping there will be many of them across the country for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Rosin: Okay. You started by saying people ask you, so clearly people are worried. And then you answered by saying it’s not going to be the same. So is your general answer to them, No need to worry? Like, Don’t worry. There won’t be violence? Is that how, like—do you feel secure? It will be okay?

Raskin: It will not be an instant replay of what happened on January 6, 2021. It will look very different. In some sense, the new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA. This is equivalent to the lies he was telling about COVID-19 last time to try to condition his followers to accept his Big Lie about the election. And he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process in the electoral system.

So that part of it has already begun. When I’m out campaigning around the country, I say we have two urgent tasks: One is to win the election, and two is to defend the election. Because as we saw from the last time around, Donald Trump doesn’t remotely consider it over once the ballots have been tallied if he loses the election. And that, of course, is a hallmark characteristic of an authoritarian, and an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarian political parties don’t accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.

Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, is not running what I would recognize as a real election campaign, which is about canvassing, door knocking, organizing people. I don’t see that happening. I see it happening on the Democratic side everywhere I go. I don’t see it on the Republican side almost anywhere I go. They’re running a campaign of raising a lot of money. A lot of it disappears into different mystery boxes, but basically, they’re running a campaign on TV and then getting ready to attack the election process.

Rosin: Yes. He says, Cheat like hell, in almost every state. If we lose these states, if we lose this state—Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever state—it’s because they cheat like hell.

So I’m trying to give listeners an accurate picture. There’s one picture: Oh, we’re just going to have violence the way we had before. There’s another picture, which is: It’s going to be fine. So I’m just trying to prepare readers, listeners for what is realistically the thing that you should be vigilant and watch out for and what might actually happen.

Raskin: Well, I think it’s going to be a fight to certify the actual election vote. And remember, this is something that, for most of our lifetimes, we’ve taken for granted: simply that people will vote and that the votes will be counted fairly—they will be tallied fairly—and then the majority will be translated through an electoral system that has integrity to it.

You know, the Trump methodology here is to attack the electoral system, to disrupt the electoral system, and then try to blame everything on his opponents. I mean, this is an absolute historical anomaly. And so we need to have clarity about what’s going on.

And we have to, as citizens in a completely nonpartisan way—we have to be defending the integrity of the electoral process against this kind of attack.

Rosin: He has said many times that he would pardon the J6ers. He could pardon the J6ers, right? There’s nothing, if he wins, that would prevent him from doing that.

Raskin: Certainly not under the Supreme Court’s decision. I mean, the pardon power would be a paradigm example of a core function of the presidency that the president could exercise without any fear of criminal prosecution. I mean, when Trump figures that out, he’ll probably end up selling pardons.

They came close to doing it last time, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t go on eBay and just start selling them under that rancid opinion issued by his justices.

Rosin: I didn’t realize you could do that. You probably just gave him an idea.

Raskin: Yeah. (Laughs.) But look—let me say something about that. They call the January 6 insurrectionists convicted of assaulting federal officers or destroying federal property or seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government, “political prisoners.” So they liken them to, you know, [Alexei] Navalny. They liken them to [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or to Nelson Mandela. These were people who were fighting for freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. These people were fighting for an authoritarian coup against a constitutional democracy, and they’ve had every aspect of due process, and they’ve been convicted for their crimes against us.

A lot of the Trumpian revisionist assault on January 6 is internally contradictory. It’s just illogical. Half of the time, they’re saying that the people who attacked the police and who attacked the Capitol were not MAGA—they were antifa dressed as MAGA. Then the other half of the time, they’re down in the D.C. jail demanding the release of these alleged antifa fighters. Why are they demanding the release of the antifa fighters? It makes no sense. So there’s just incoherence replete throughout the propaganda assault on January 6. The point for them is to confuse people and to destroy the moral clarity of what happened, but it was perfectly clear what happened on that day.

There were people of both political parties and all political persuasions standing by the rule of law and acting under the Constitution, and then people trying to destroy the Constitution in order to overthrow an election and put Donald Trump back in power unlawfully.

Rosin: I mean, yeah. If you’re a student of autocracy, like The Atlantic is, the point is to say something, in some ways, as an autocratic leader that’s patently untrue and dare you to believe it as a loyalty test. I mean, that’s one, as Anne Applebaum—she’s been doing a series about that. It has really enlightened me on what the lies are about. They’re a test, you know? And so the more absurd they are—like, they’re about Haitians eating pets or whatever—like, the more ridiculous they are and the more you are willing to believe them, the more that seals the lock between the leader and the follower.

So that’s why I sometimes get a little despairing around, like, Well, we’re just going to keep telling the truth, because that’s not the game they’re playing, you know? So what does fact-checking and journalism and, like, recording things really help? Sometimes, you know, I feel that way about it.

Raskin: I mean, Trump’s lies are not about illumination or even contests over the facts. Trump’s lies are about coercion and obedience and submission of his followers.

Rosin: But that’s difficult. That’s difficult to counter. Like, how do you get in between it? The truth doesn’t really get in between it. The truth makes you an enemy.

Raskin: Well, when you look at the way that cult leaders operate, they tell lies all the time. Nobody really feels like it’s necessary to contradict their lies, because they’re so self-evidently ridiculous. And we can see the way that their lives are just meant to regulate and control their followers. And so it’s just a question of naming what’s actually happening.

Rosin: And continuing to do that, with some faith that the majority of people will eventually sort of drift over to the side of truth.

Raskin: Yeah, and also to make sure that a majority of the people are going to stand up for the facts, the truth, and for democratic institutions.

Rosin: Jack Smith’s case. Any thoughts about that?

Raskin: Well, Jack Smith is now paddling upstream because of the Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that the president has immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits under the rubric of his office.

You would think those would be the worst kinds of crimes, but no. Those are presumptively immune from prosecution, and if they’re within his core functions of office, then they’re absolutely immune.

Donald Trump was never acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to overturn an election, simply because that’s not part of the president’s job. It’s not part of the president’s job to have anything to do with the presidential election. When he’s trying to set up counterfeit elector slates, he’s not involved with the Electoral College. That’s done at the state level, and the state legislatures do it. And then the results are sent in to the House and the Senate and the archivist. They’re not sent to the president.

When he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, and said, Just find me 11,780 votes, or called other election officials to harangue them—that’s not part of the president’s job. He was calling as a candidate, not as a president. And as a candidate, he was acting as an outlaw candidate and really as a tyrant, somebody trying to topple the whole constitutional order.

You know, a tyrant, in the Greek sense of the word, is someone who rises up from outside of the constitutional order to try to attack the constitutional order. And that’s a pretty accurate description and definition of what Donald Trump has done.

[Music]

Rosin: There’s a last thing I want to talk to Raskin about, and it pushed against everything he had just told me: When is it time to start moving on from January 6? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: In the year I spent reporting my podcast about January 6, I came across a very interesting idea for how to approach the memory of that day differently. It was in an essay by journalist Linda Kinstler called “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.” Kinstler’s argument—or at least one part of it—is that we are a culture saturated in memories.

We have videos and body cams and security cameras. Almost every inch of January 6 is recorded, which is a good thing for, say, a trial. But also, it makes it harder for us to forgive and forget. Back in the day, American political leaders called it “oblivion.” It was used in certain moments in American history, like after the Civil War, when obsessively remembering might just bring on more and more cycles of recrimination and vengeance.

So I ran this question by Raskin. He’s a constitutional lawyer and also a philosophical thinker. Might there ever be a time when oblivion might be the appropriate strategy for January 6?

[Break]

Rosin: All right—last thing: Whether he wins or loses, we have a culture to deal with, a culture of Americans, 30 percent of whom still think that the election wasn’t fair, was stolen in some way. So that’s with us. That’s the state of our nation right now, whoever wins and loses.

I’ve been reading about a—it’s a philosophical, legal, political theory of oblivion. Like, is there a time when cycles of recrimination or justice have to yield to something else? Is there ever a moment when you’re remembering too much? Does that make any sense to you?

Raskin: Mm-hmm. Well, it will be important for us always to remember these events and the facts of what took place. But I suppose, you know, human beings are made up of a mixture of thoughts and passions and emotions. And just like the passions and emotions have diminished somewhat from the Civil War, perhaps the passions and emotions around January 6 will begin to subside.

But at this point, with the republic still so much under attack, and with so many lies and so much propaganda and disinformation and revisionism out there, I believe that the passions and the emotion surrounding January 6 are still very much there, and they should be there until we can actually dispel this threat of authoritarianism in our country.

Rosin: So a potentially useful idea for healing, but just not yet. Is that where we land? Because I’m very taken—I find this theory interesting, that there’s a history post-Civil War of oblivion. You know, that it’s talked about by politicians: It’s time for oblivion. And right now, you know, we have video memories. Everything’s taped, recorded. So it’s very hard, actually, to do something like that.

Raskin: Well, thank God it’s all taped, and thank God there are videos, because you can see the way they’re lying about it, even in the face of the videos and the absolute factual documentation.

Look—I would say that historical memory is essential to establishing our values and principles for the future. One hopes that in the case of a society or a nation, that we’re not disabled by a memory the way that individuals can be disabled by a memory through post-traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I’m hoping we’re able to integrate this into the true American story.

But as long as people are out there lying about January 6 and claiming it was really antifa or it was really the FBI or something, it’s going to be important for us to insist upon the facts and bring passion to the project of making people see the truth and remember.

[Break]

Rosin: That was my interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin. My thanks to him for taking the time to chat with me. Now, before we end, I want to share a bit from the other podcast I made recently, We Live Here Now.

I can’t say that we managed to convince our neighbors of our version of the truth. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series to hear what happened. It starts with the ridiculous way we met them, and it moves through a lot of characters in their alternate universe, including some J6ers who’d been just released from prison.

But here, I’m going to share with you something from the final episode of the series because it’s kind of in the spirit of oblivion. Even though we didn’t change their minds, something softened.

The two people you are about to hear are Lauren Ober—she’s my partner, who co-hosted the series—and Micki Witthoeft—she’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot and killed on that day. Micki is our neighbor. This is from Lauren’s final interview with Micki.

Lauren Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews?

Micki Witthoeft: I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—

But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!

Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.

Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.

Rosin: You can listen to We Live Here Now anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.