WASHINGTON — It took decades for defenders of the Confederacy to rewrite the history of the Civil War to reframe the treasonous attack by Southern rebels against the United States as an act of honor and courage.
It took Donald Trump much less time to accomplish the same feat in his January 6, 2021, coup attempt.
Just four years later, the deadly attack on the Capitol, incited by Trump himself, meant that day’s efforts to end, or at least suspend, American democracy have instead become peaceful protests that have become part of the nation’s mass demonstrations. Persecuted by Trump’s political opponents.
“What they have in common is that in both cases, a story is propagated that a segment of the population wants to hear because it forgives them or their group of people for violations not only of the law, but of commonly accepted norms. “It’s not like the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction is taught in schools,” said Gabriel Reich, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who has studied how schools teach the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“Liberal democracies really struggle with malicious actors manipulating existing rules and norms for their own benefit,” he added.
Counterterrorism expert Tom Joslin, a member of the House January 6 Committee and co-author of the report, said he still finds it hard to believe that people could still see what happened that day on television. I accept Trump’s position. Unlike children who grew up in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Civil War was a past generation, Trump’s followers and allies reject the readily available evidence of modern-day violence.
“Based on the images and videos from that day, what he said himself, and what he saw with his own eyes, it was clear that he had crossed a line to some extent,” he said. “All of that should have been disqualifying, but it wasn’t.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries. Even after his victory last November, Trump continued to lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and portrayed those accused of his actions on January 6 as political prisoners.
“These people have been treated really, really badly,” he told TIME last month. “They have suffered greatly, and in many cases they should not have suffered.”
Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican political consultant in Florida, remembers reading the plaque honoring fallen Confederate soldiers in his town square as a child. “That’s how we grew up. “We knew that too,” he said.
He added that it was a notable achievement that Trump was able to revise his history so quickly.
“This is a tribute to the ability of Trump and his associates to persuade half the country,” Stipanovich said. “And this is a powerful indictment of the intelligence community of half of this country.”
From protecting slavery to honoring the ‘Lost Cause’
When the United States elected as president the leader of a political party committed to the abolition of slavery, 11 Southern states decided to secede and began a war against the remaining states. Given the Federation’s industrial and population advantages, the defeat of these rebel states was inevitable, and 700,000 people subsequently died.
But within just a few years, the effort to reinvent loss and the motivations behind it began. Confederate sympathizers and racists in academia, the media, and politics portrayed men like Robert E. Lee, the U.S. military officer who took up arms against the United States, as tragic American heroes. And the preservation of human slavery, the reason behind the war, was replaced by a principled defense of “states’ rights.” Even though slavery was explicitly cited in the states’ own secession articles.
“They’ve had teachers, including college-level historians, teach that story as historical truth while simultaneously suppressing other viewpoints in the media,” said VCU’s Reich.
Although it took decades for iterations filled with the construction of statues and monuments to the leaders of the failed rebellion, this “Lost Cause” myth eventually became an accepted narrative primarily in the South, but to a lesser extent nationally. Some U.S. military bases in the first half of the 20th century were named after Confederate officers.
In contrast, Trump’s propaganda campaign to redefine January 6th proceeded at lightning speed.
The initial consensus on January 6 and in the days immediately following was that Trump incited the attack on the Capitol and was wrong to do so. Republican congressional leaders criticized him in floor speeches. Trump himself read prepared remarks to his rioters on Jan. 7 warning that “those who break the law will pay.”
Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, expressed the conventional wisdom at the time that Trump was over. “I think he’s lost whatever political viability he was going to have,” she told Politico in a Jan. 12 interview.
Four years later, Trump will soon return to the White House he left in disgrace. His new administration will be full of people who will try to repeat and spread continued lies about the 2020 election. And he promised not only to pardon those accused of taking part in the January 6 attack but also to prosecute those who try to hold him and his followers accountable.
The victory of repeated lies
Trump’s ability to return to power despite everything may have been predictable because he never lost the loyalty of his Republican primary voting base.
Indeed, the day after his failed coup attempt, an overwhelming majority of the 163 members of the Republican National Committee gave him sustained applause when he convened the winter meeting in Amelia Island, Florida.
Three weeks later, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, then the top Republican elected official, visited Trump at a South Florida country club, effectively signaling that Trump was still the party’s leader. Two weeks later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., condemned Trump’s actions leading up to Jan. 6 but voted not to convict Trump of inciting the insurrection following his impeachment by the House. A conviction would be followed by a vote to ban him from federal office for life.
By April, the RNC was again holding fundraisers at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and depositing donors’ money into Trump’s personal bank account. Officials have privately acknowledged that Trump remains the biggest fundraiser and must go along with the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen because voters believed it to be true. Even though the only reason for that belief was Trump’s lies.
And in late 2021, following the release of conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson’s “documentary” claiming the January 6 insurrection was actually an FBI “false flag” operation, Trump cleared those accused of taking part in his coup attempt. I started calling. — hundreds of people even convicted of assaulting police officers — “hostages” and “political prisoners.”
A growing number of Republican candidates for office big and small have made the pilgrimage to Palm Beach to garner his support. Journalists made similar trips to ask about his candidacy to regain the presidency in 2024, not about his unprecedented attempts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
The new “cause lost” myth of January 6th is complete.
“It’s disheartening,” Jocelyn said.
Stipanovich, who left the Republican Party in 2016 as it embraced Trump, said a more appropriate comparison would be Trump’s rewriting of Jan. 6, and that what’s at issue may be the way Adolf Hitler and the Nazis braved the 1923 Beer Hall Riots. said. It was an act of patriotism, not an attempted coup that sent Hitler and others to prison.
“When we fail, the heroes of that failure become our hope for the future,” he said.
Whatever the appropriate historical analogy, it’s troubling that Trump has attacked democracy like he used to and still managed to return to power, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. Sabato also grew up in a state where the Civil War was taught as a “war of northern aggression.”
He warned, “The lost cause was the ‘big lie,’ but I’m not sure Trump’s ‘big lie’ will ever go away.” “This is not cynicism. “This is the reality we face.”
