Call it the revenge of January 6th. Republicans have tried everything to make voters forget about that terrible day for American democracy. They have ignored it, downplayed it, or pretended nothing much happened. On the campaign trail this year, Donald Trump has opted for outright revisionism, rebranding the insurrectionists who tried to stop Congress from certifying his electoral defeat as peaceful protesters who have become jailed martyrs on his behalf. On Tuesday night, J. D. Vance, in the signature moment of his Vice-Presidential debate with Tim Walz, refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election—an act of fealty to Trump’s lies which underscored why Vance is on the G.O.P. ticket in the first place, because he has expressed a willingness to do what Mike Pence would not. “Tim, I’m focussed on the future,” Vance said dismissively. It was, Walz quickly retorted, “a damning non-answer.”
Sometimes, though, history shows up when summoned. The day after Vance’s comments, a judge unsealed a brief from the special counsel Jack Smith, which contained a detailed account of the evidence that the prosecutor wants to present in court to document Trump’s unprecedented effort to overturn the last election. If, in a little more than a month from now, Trump is reëlected to office, Smith’s criminal case against the ex-President will almost certainly disappear. This brief means that at least the record will show more fully what Trump did on the day that a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol—and in the two months leading up to it. He can spin the past, but he cannot entirely bury it.
Of the many revealing incidents disclosed in the brief, one in particular stood out to me: Trump, on Marine One, speaking to his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who were both official government employees in his White House. “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” he told them, according to an unnamed White House aide’s testimony. “You still have to fight like hell.” This, in all its nihilistic disregard for anything and anyone other than his own interests, is Trump’s personal credo. There is not a more complicated rationale for January 6th, unfortunately, than that statement—it was not about “election integrity” or vote fraud or anything other than a rogue President putting himself above any other consideration. Trump was willing to defy the law and the Constitution, to flout the facts, and to reject the conclusion of his own Attorney General, his own Vice-President, his own White House counsel, and dozens of judges to stay in power. Does anyone doubt that, if need be, he would do it again?
No wonder, then, that Trump responded as he did to Smith’s filing, immediately fulminating on social media about the “falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief” and the “Deranged” prosecutor who submitted it. The goal, according to Trump, was to “INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.” It’s such a tell—the facts are so damning about Trump and January 6th that bringing them up, even in the dry format of a hundred-and-sixty-five-page legal brief—in a court proceeding triggered by Trump’s own appeals—is construed as electioneering against him. Fact-checking, in general, is now considered a partisan sport by the fact-challenged G.O.P. ticket. Pro-Trump commentators had a collective heart attack during Tuesday night’s debate, when Margaret Brennan, one of the CBS News moderators, briefly strayed from the network’s announced policy of not disputing the candidates’ misstatements to correct Vance’s assertion that “illegal immigrants” were overwhelming resources in Springfield, Ohio. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance complained. Fox News pundits later labelled the moderators “obnoxious” and whined about their “smug, arrogant bias.”
But if anything, I’d say the debate’s format boosted Vance by allowing him the pretense that his and Trump’s campaign is something approximating a normal electoral clash over competing visions for the country, rooted in civilized policy differences, when that is emphatically not the case. Just days earlier, Trump had said at a rally that he’d like to unleash the police for “one really violent day” to stop a nonexistent crime wave. No one asked Vance about that. Nor, for that matter, did they mention that Trump himself is a convicted criminal. (Amazing—the guy is an actual felon at this point, and it doesn’t even rate as an aside.) Both Vance and Trump have embraced extremist positions far outside the American mainstream, such as promising to round up illegal migrants and place them in camps and openly repeating Russian talking points about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Those were never mentioned. The moderators spent more than an hour and a half questioning Vance and Walz before ever getting to the existential matter of American democracy. And even then, it was Walz who had to ask Vance about Trump’s 2020 election lies.
This was not only an essential question but a belated glimpse into the essence of Vance as a politician. It should be noted that in refusing to answer Walz, Vance did not just obfuscate about who won in 2020; he actually tried to rewrite history to pretend that Trump, without whose incitement the attack on the Capitol never would have occurred, had simply given up power peacefully. On Thursday, Vance skipped the insincere excuses and simply came out and said directly what he had danced around on the debate stage. “Who won the 2020 election? Did Donald Trump win?” he was asked, this time by Jason Selvig, a co-host of the political-comedy podcast “The Good Liars.” “Yes,” Vance responded. When Selvig then pursued Vance into a narrow hallway, asking whether he would concede the election this time around if the Democrats won more votes, Vance stopped for a brief second. “I really feel bad for you, man,” he replied.
In a purely political sense, January 6th is at the heart of the case for the anti-Trump Republicans, a small but, in my perhaps unfashionable view, potentially mighty slice of the electorate. The ex-President’s conduct in the aftermath of the 2020 election is the ultimate disqualifier for this group, the most straightforward possible justification for why it is necessary to break with their party even in this age of extreme partisanship.
I have spent some time recently with two of the leading Republican apostates to have endorsed Kamala Harris over Trump—Liz Cheney, the former House Republican leader who co-chaired the House’s January 6th select committee, and J. Michael Luttig, the conservative former federal judge who advised Pence to reject Trump’s demands on January 6th. Both of them make the case that this is an election not between right and left, as Luttig memorably put it, but between right and wrong. On Thursday, Cheney campaigned in the swing state of Wisconsin, in the small town of Ripon, where the Republican Party was founded, in the mid-nineteenth century. Cheney made January 6th the center of her nonpartisan case against Trump. As if she was reciting from Jack Smith’s brief, she kept the audience rapt by recounting Trump’s actions, sitting alone in his White House dining room, tweeting while the Capitol was under siege. She even recounted one of the most stunning new details in Smith’s filing—that Trump, upon being told that his Vice-President was in danger, had replied, “So what?” “Putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration—it is our duty” she concluded. “Our institutions don’t defend themselves.”
When J. D. Vance says never mind about January 6th, let me tell you about rampaging illegal immigrants, when Trump talks about “Comrade Kamala” and the “radical-left Democrats,” they are betting on the irresistible allure of the right-versus-left frame in our politics. But, if only a small number of the millions of Republicans who voted against Trump earlier this year in the primaries do so again, in November, he will likely lose the election.
The smug conventional wisdom has it that voters don’t care much about abstractions like democracy or the rule of law. I’m sure it’s true that, for most Americans, their own economic well-being or personal freedoms may well be top of mind in the election. That’s understandable. “We won’t go back” resonates as a slogan for Harris against Trump, because it’s not just about keeping the man away from the White House but also about not returning to his retrograde policies. And yet there is both political salience—and powerful clarity—in reminding voters, of any party, about Trump’s attack on democracy itself.
David, a two-time Trump voter from Missouri, sums up this argument succinctly in a video testimonial, one of many collected by the group Republican Voters Against Trump. His reason for switching now, he says, “all started on January 6th, when Trump tried to overthrow the government. I don’t agree with everything that the Democrats want to do, but I know that they don’t want to overthrow the government, and it’s really that simple.”
Of course, J. D. Vance doesn’t want to talk about it. Some things are complicated; some things are not. ♦
