Trump Is Trying To Rewrite The History Of Jan. 6, That’s What The Pardons And Reparations Talk Is All About

Every single day that President Donald Trump is in office comes with a new attempt to rewrite America’s history, usually in a way that promotes fictional anti-white oppression and pretends factual systemic racism against Black people is virtually nonexistent.

White conservatives have framed their anti-DEI war as a fight against anti-white racism when it’s actually a furtherance of white supremacy that denies America’s overwhelming history of racism, which is why diversity initiatives are necessary in the first place. Their war against critical race theory — an academic framework for examining systemic racism that has existed in higher education since the late ’80s but was just discovered by the MAGA world in 2020 — is framed as an effort to stop educators from teaching that white people are inherently racist (which CRT does not teach) when their anti-CRT war is actually just a fight to protect white people’s feelings from the truth about their beloved America.

Trump is even out here trying to rewrite recent history, and if journalists, documentarians and actual historians refuse to confirm his alternate facts, then he’ll rewrite history through executive order. And that’s why Trump is currently out here toying around with the idea of paying reparations to Jan. 6 convicts.

From Politico:

Speaking to Newsmax on Tuesday night, Trump said he had taken “care” of his supporters who attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss and added there is “talk” about compensating them.

“A lot of the people that are in the government now talk about it because a lot of the people in government really like that group of people,” he said, referring to the Jan. 6 defendants, who he described as protesting “peacefully and patriotically.”

Some of the freed Jan. 6 rioters and their advocates, such as Ed Martin, whom Trump appointed to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington, have long called for financial reparations for those who took part in the Capitol attack, many of whom subsequently spent time behind bars.

Yes, Trump, because the Republican Party now dominates both chambers of Congress and the executive office, there are “a lot of people in the government” who are so hypocritical and, by their definition, un-American, that they would consider paying restitution to domestic terrorists who attacked police officers and tried to upend democracy and the U.S. Constituiton simply because those terrorists spent time in jail where they belonged. But that doesn’t make it right, legal, practical or moral, and it certainly wouldn’t be a show of patriotism.

Let’s be real about one thing, though: none of this has anything to do with supporting the Jan. 6 convicts — it’s about reframing what Jan. 6 was entirely.

But before we get into all that, let me point to a thing I wrote after Trump’s first term about the “big lie” that set Jan. 6 in motion in the first place:

I’m not sure we talk enough about the sheer ridiculousness of what Donald Trump tried to pull off at the end of the “South Park” outtake episode that was his abysmal presidency. I mean, we talk about how criminal it was, and how shameful, but I don’t know if we’ve ever collectively sat down to appreciate the absurdity of it all.

Think about it: In the 21st century, a sitting president of the United States responded to losing his bid for reelection by throwing an extended and very public temper tantrum and embarking on possibly the most transparent propaganda campaign in modern politics.

The idea that the election had been rigged — that voting machines had been programmed to abracadabra Trump votes into Biden votes; that dead people were being registered to vote blue in masses the size of zombie herds from The Walking Dead — was allowed to persevere despite the fact that it had no validity.

Dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court joined the former head of election cybersecurity, Trump’s own attorney general and the Department of Justice in saying clearly and unmistakably that there was no evidence of a rigged election.

So, that’s not a history that can be taught truthfully if Trump wants to cement himself as one of America’s greatest presidents. Trump can’t have history remembering him as the bumbling commander-in-chief who responded to losing an election by launching a propaganda campaign that ultimately inspired criminals to attack the U.S. Capitol, physically assault police officers and attempt to forcefully overturn a legal and fair election. A president like that would certainly be remembered by objective historians as one of America’s worst, not best.

Trump needs to rewrite that history, which is why he unilaterally pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, and it’s why he has to repeat as often as possible that those writers were actually protesters who behaved “peacefully and patriotically.” Again, he didn’t free the Jan. 6 prisoners for their benefit, he freed them because their freedom, in his mind, legitimizes what they did and, by extension, what he did.

Hell, Trump still claims to this day that the 2020 election was rigged against him despite the fact that he has never presented a single shred of evidence that it happened. They say history is written by the victors. Well, in this case, history is being rewritten by the losers who are even rewriting the part where they lost.

While floating around the idea of Jan. 6 reparations, Trump even attempted to rewrite the story of Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Lt. Michael Byrd as she attempted to climb through a shattered window into the Speaker’s Lobby.

Trump, who appears to be completely unaware that the shooting was captured on Capitol security cameras, told a different version of the story that certainly made use of artistic liberty. (That’s my overly polite way of saying he lied out of the butthole in the middle of his face.)

“Ashli Babbitt was a really good person who was a big MAGA fan, Trump fan, and she was innocently standing there — they even say trying to sort of hold back the crowd — and a man did something to her that was unthinkable when he shot her.”

Again, there were cameras there. Those cameras captured Babbit attempting to climb through a window and getting herself shot by an officer who had warned her to stop. She wasn’t just standing there, and she certainly wasn’t trying to hold back the crowd.

The truth doesn’t need an editor. Trump is trying to turn his lies into historical fact on EO at a time. We can’t let him do that.

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