Five Ways To Remember January 6th

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Today, of course, marks a very somber fifth anniversary of January 6th — and it’s clear today that the insurrectionists won. Perhaps they merely won the battle and the forces of democracy will win the longer-term war, but history’s verdict is still very much out about that.

In recent months, one of the central points of my talks on US politics is that I believe the major mistake that Democrats, and especially the Biden administration, made after January 6th — their “original sin” if you will — was viewing January 6th as the end of something, rather than the beginning of something.

Too many people saw January 6th as the final aggrieved death throes of Trumpism. We can now understand it was the start of something much darker. I’m not going to try to write some grand essay about “what January 6th means” — again, I think we’re still figuring that out together and, as a nation, voters, and citizens, we have a great deal to say in future elections and political moments to shape what January 6th will mean to our country. Instead, I want to zero in on five reflections and aspects of that day (as well as one bonus newsworthy mystery!) that I hope you’ll consume and consider as you weigh what it means:

The Facts: Over the holidays, congressional Democrats released the full closed-door testimony of former special counsel Jack Smith, who during the Biden years was appointed to investigate Donald Trump’s role in January 6th and the Big Lie of 2020. It’s clear from the testimony how strong Smith’s testimony was — and why House Republicans didn’t want him appearing in public to give it. At one point, he said he was confident he had “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” in both of his indictments of Trump, the election interference case and the illegally retained classified documents case.

Two sections of the testimony I think are worth highlighting. Many people — and including a troubling number of the most important figures in the current administration — continue to lie about what happened on January 6th. This first section of Smith’s testimony, below, succinctly highlights the criminal culpability of Donald Trump in the events of January 6th:

Secondly, under questioning Smith in his testimony showed the ongoing danger of January 6th to our democracy:

Catastrophic. Sit with that. And think how much our system failed to respond to such a catastrophic threat to our democracy.

The Crimes: It’s worth remembering today just how much crime there was on January 6th and how dangerous it is that Donald Trump’s first act as president was to pardon everyone involved. It wasn’t a bunch of tourists run amok. There was unbelievable violence and multiple seditious conspiracies that day by far-right militia groups, who came prepared for even greater violence. People died. Many more were injured, including more than 140 police officers who defended our Capitol and the most basic process of democracy.

As Mark Follman wrote last year, “The January 6 attackers—many of whom had gone to the Capitol prepared for violence—used weapons including chemical sprays, Tasers, baseball bats, hockey sticks, pipes, metal flagpoles, and allegedly even explosive devices.” I had the chance to interview MPD Officer Michael Fanone in 2024 about the terror he felt that day — read his memoir HOLD THE LINE for more — and it’s something we should never forget. We have been too quick to downplay it and memory hole it.

The Counterexamples: I’ve written in the past that I believe Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon perhaps set the wrong example for the United States. We now have this weird taboo now about sending former presidents to prison, but in a healthy democracy that truly believes “no one is above the law” we wouldn’t. In the five years since January 6, 2021, two other democracies both faced their own version of insurrectionists attempting to overturn elections. Both of those countries handled it better — and more definitively — than we did.

• In Brazil in 2022, the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro attempted to remain in office after losing the election, using loyal government forces and the military in an attempt to arrest political opponents and shut down government institutions. In January 2023, much like our own January 6th, supporters stormed government buildings in the capital of Brasília. It failed. Some 1,400 people have been arrested and charged since. Bolsonaro was among those arrested, alongside 36 other co-conspirators, and he was tried last September. He’s now serving a 27-year prison term (although, for obvious reasons he’s become quite the cause célèbre for the Trump world, so I wouldn’t be surprised for Trump to try more shenanigans to free him early.)

• In December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, provoking widespread protests. Less two week later, he was impeached and suspended from office. He was arrested the following month, in January 2025, and indicting for leading an insurrection. Last spring, the country’s Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment and removal from office. His trials are still ongoing, and subsequent impeachments and criminal investigations have swept up a host of other officials who supported his attempted insurrection.

I’ll never get over thinking about what would have happened if either Congress had moved to impeach and remove Donald Trump on the night of January 6th or if the Biden administration had moved faster to investigate, prosecute, and arrest Donald Trump thereafter. Trump’s rise and return to power was not a foregone conclusion. The fecklessness of our political system — and particularly the cowardice of the Republican Party — allowed it to happen.

The Sounds: Over recent years, I’ve done two podcast episodes that focus on January 6th because it has become so central to so much of our political lives — one, the final episode of our Long Shadow season about the rise of the American far-right, “The Day of the Rope,” and then, last year, the second-to-last episode of our season on the rise and fall of social media.

Listen to the first episode to hear how January 6th represented the culmination of 40 years of far-right extremism, fulfilling a vision of white nationalism laid out decades ago in Neo-Nazi fan fiction The Turner Diaries.

Listen to the second to understand how January 6th is best considered as part of the larger context of the rise of conspiracism in American life and the full breadth of 2020, when the combination of Covid, George Floyd, and the Big Lie collectively melted America’s political brain. (I still think we haven’t reckoned with how much the country lost its mind in 2020 and how much we’re living with the consequences today.) The second episode, in particular, tells the story of Pam Hemphill, the so-called “MAGA Granny,” and her journey into and out of the MAGA conspiracy world.

The Voices: I want to point you to today to two new books, both oral histories, both by fabulous journalists, that examine January 6th. I’ve had the pleasure of perusing both already and think they help frame an important conversation about the reality of the violence, conspiracy, and danger of that day.

Most of all, as with good oral history, they’ll put you back in the moment about how those days were to live first-hand. I promise you’ll feel your own heart race as you read the hours of January 6th ticking by.

Nora Neus’s 24 HOURS AT THE CAPITOL, which Booklist gave a starred review, calling it “an especially important document.”

Mary Clare Jalonick’s STORM AT THE CAPITOL, which Kirkus also gave a starred review, saying it was “a document of central concern to all those concerned with the future of American democracy.”

I hope if not today than sometime this winter you’ll spend some time with one of these books. We owe it future generations to keep the truth of that day alive.

Lastly, The Mystery: I’m going to send a separate newsletter about Venezuela later today (sorry for the double hit!), but there’s one angle about January 6th that links up to the Maduro capture operation. One of the craziest Trump theories about 2020 — one that at the time was pushed forward by Sydney Powell and even then seemed particularly crazy — was that Maduro manipulated voting machines to help Joe Biden win.

In the hours since the weekend’s capture-slash-kidnapping operation, we’re starting to see Trump-linked officials, including at least one Justice Department official and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, point to how Maduro could now “blow the lid off” the 2020 Big Lie conspiracies:

One thing to wonder: Is there going to be a dark quiet room in the days, weeks, or months ahead where Maduro sits with some corrupt Justice Department official — a la whatever happened in the meeting between Todd Blanche and Ghislaine Maxwell that preceded her rapid transfer to a low-security prison camp — and makes a deal to publicly admit “stealing” the 2020 election, admitting that Trump was right all along, in exchange for a light sentence (or no sentence at all) and a return to Venezuela or a comfortable life exile overseas? I can certainly imagine crazier and less likely things that have happened in recent years.

Anyway, with that: Happy New Year! And, as I said, stay tuned later today for another piece on Venezuela.  

GMG

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CORRECTION: I updated this post to correct which Justice Department official met with Maxwell; it was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, not his predecessor, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove.