There’s still another unsettling consideration here. If and when Trump pardons the January 6 attackers, media commentary will exude a strong push toward “turning the page” and “looking forward, not backward.” But as Brian Beutler argues, all this impulse really does is risk encouraging exponentially more right-wing degeneracy later. Indeed, this instinct toward absolution will be doubly absurd coming even as Trump is preparing to escalate the lawlessness and unleash sadistic persecution of an ever-expanding list of enemies within.
Yet let’s face it: Chances are it will be politically challenging to explain to the public why all those things from way back in the past should still weigh on us, and why we must resist a mass forgetting of them. By successfully ending prosecutions of himself and by pardoning the Capitol attackers, Trump will in effect be trying to make Jan. 6 disappear, and it will be hard to explain why it matters that Trump is effectively rewriting all of it as a massive historical lie.
Democrats need to start thinking through how they’re going to talk about all these things when this Great Rewrite begins, and the confirmation hearings for one of the chief authors of that rewrite are a good place to start. Senate Democrats: Make them count.
