Anyone who treats or talks about history as a fixed narrative knows nothing about history at all. History yields to fresh insights and new research. It’s hijacked by agendas. After being written by the victors, it sometimes allows the losers a few edits. It’s reinvestigated, relitigated, recast.
But the makeover of Jan. 6, 2021, just four short years later stands disturbingly apart from that. It adds a chilling contemporary twist:
What happens when a demagogue with grandiose ambitions, few if any scruples and little regard for honesty has, at his disposal, an utterly corrupted information environment like ours? When he enjoys a playing field so ideally suited for lies?
A day of violence becomes “a day of love.” Rioters who injured scores of police officers and spilled blood on the Capitol steps become “hostages” jailed for their valor. And nearly 1,600 pardons and commutations are issued by that demagogue, who is confident that he can get away with it — that he can even be celebrated for it — because he has minted and steadfastly marketed a version of events that serves his purposes.
President Trump’s Day 1 legal reprieves for members of the violent mob that ransacked the Capitol and tore through its marble hallways on the hunt for lawmakers are first and foremost an affront to common decency and a betrayal of bedrock democratic principles. But they also present a cautionary example of how quickly and how far we now travel — or can be tugged — from truth. Of how assiduously and successfully someone can degrade it.
Over the past few days, I’ve reviewed the polling of Americans about Jan. 6, and it’s complicated. Some surveys suggest that between 2021 and now, many Americans have drifted away from the conviction that the rioters warrant criminal prosecution. Others show a mostly sustained disapproval of what happened.
“The biggest movement hasn’t been from ‘Jan. 6 bad’ to ‘Jan. 6 good’ but rather from ‘Jan. 6 bad’ to people saying they’re ‘not sure’ just how bad it is — which for some might just be ‘I don’t care enough to say,’” Aaron Blake wrote in an excellent recent column in The Washington Post with the priceless headline “The Meh-ification of Jan. 6.”
But if Trump hasn’t exactly or thoroughly replaced fact with fiction, he has at least obscured reality to a point where many Americans can’t be bothered to recognize it — too many shadows, too much concentration required. Deceiving people and numbing them aren’t entirely separate phenomena. They overlap.
Trump’s transformation of Jan. 6 falls in line with countless instances of his telling Americans that they’re misperceiving something that they aren’t, being tricked when he’s the trickster, swallowing whole a gumbo of bunk that his enemies or the so-called establishment has cooked up.
It shows once again that he’s not merely a serial liar but a strategic one. He understands the power of going big — of making extreme claims, insisting on the opposite of the actual, swearing by it emphatically and sticking to it constantly despite all evidence and any claims to the contrary. Many listeners inevitably assume that he must have some truth on his side if he’s projecting so much conviction, such a potent sense of grievance. Otherwise, surely, he’d hedge and waver.
But none of that would matter so much if he weren’t operating in the media ecosystem that he is. While political tribalism has always been with us, modern technology — first cable television, then the internet, now artificial intelligence — has handed the Trumps of the world tools for exploiting it that their forebears couldn’t even dream of. It has created legions of co-conspirators, too. Many “news” providers follow a model of telling consumers only what affirms their desired worldview and validates their biases. Not fond of one reality? Here’s another.
That hit me especially hard when the House committee investigating Jan. 6 got to work. I saw Fox News segments and articles on conservative websites that portrayed the committee’s mission as indulgent because inflation was a bigger problem, because the border demanded more attention, because fill-in-the-blank. I read right-wing commentary that the real point of the inquiry was to silence Trump and crush the MAGA movement. I’m not talking about mentions here and there. I’m talking about a mountain of look-at-this-instead-of-that.
We’ve gone beyond any usual rewrite of history when the Capitol marauders become martyrs, deserving of rescue on the first day of Trump’s presidency. When what he and his minions did on Jan. 6 pales beside D.E.I. initiatives run amok. When the response to an attempted coup becomes “meh.” We’ve entered an epoch of anti-history. The man inaugurated on Monday is its author.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Times, David Brooks reacted to the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense: “I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft.” Of the debased nature of our political and cultural discourse, David added: “In the 19th century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars, followed by ‘Three Takeaways From the Lincoln-Douglas Debates,’ followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing whether Douglas had helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.” (Thanks to Gabriel Baum of Sonoma, Calif., and Nancy McGill of Seattle, among many others, for spotlighting David’s article.)
Also in The Times, Ezekiel Kweku pondered the shift in American expectations that helped set the stage for Trump: “Earning more than your parents was once a given in America, but by 2016 it had turned into a coin flip. And the lower your family’s station, the less likely you are to win that toss. Politicians and commentators tend to refer to this as the fading of the American dream, but I think ordinary Americans see it as something more fundamental. Nobody is owed a dream. The loss of this promise is a breach of contract, the theft of an inheritance. And now Americans are looking for the thieves.” (Peggy Sweeney, Oviedo, Spain)
Greg Grandin parsed Trump’s talk about global tensions and conflicts. “In treating international politics as if it were a game of Risk,” he wrote, “he’s signaling that the world is governed by new rules, which are really old rules: The powerful do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.” (Grayson Privette, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
And Maureen Dowd acknowledged the completion of Trump’s journey from aspiration to domination: “His nose is no longer pressed against the glass. And he relishes rubbing our noses in it.” Maureen also wrote that in remarks he made right after his Inaugural Address, during “a very long exegesis about building the border wall,” he “sounded like a beat poet of concrete.” (Alec Chester, Washington, D.C., and Mark Van Loon, Hamilton, Mont.)
In The New Yorker, David Remnick charted the new migratory pattern of American oligarchs: “Certain titans of Silicon Valley, Wall Street and (God forgive us) the media have hustled off to Mar-a-Lago, a scene of such flagrant self-abnegation, ring-kissing and genuflection that it would embarrass a medieval pope.” (Kathy Spicer, Fort Worth, Texas, and Nancy Loving, Minneapolis, among others)
In his Through the Fog newsletter, Elliot Kirschner also weighed in on that spectacle: “The cabal of whining tech bros eagerly performing the Mar-a-Lago Macarena is another reason for rage. As they dance, spin, pander and debase themselves, we can all see the shallowness of their convictions and the depth of their greed.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)
In The Washington Post, Ty Burr memorialized the movie director David Lynch, who died last week. “Lynch somehow made his aesthetic palatable without diluting it one drop, and in so doing became not the master of the macabre — that was Hitchcock — but something richer and stranger: the daddy of neo-Dada,” Burr wrote. (Maria O’Donnell, Arlington, Va.)
To return to The Times, Tanya Sichynsky praised uncrunchy, unfirm dishes that aren’t quite as liquid as actual soup. “So a big bowl of soft we had: a puddle of Priya Krishna’s everyday dal bleeding into her coconut saag, a combination of dishes that answers the question, ‘What if you could eat a hug?’,” she wrote. (Dan Conrad, Jasper, Ind.)
Laurence Scott defended what he called the “motion sickness” that he experiences when he reads the short stories of Mavis Gallant: “Some people enjoy the artificial fear of a slasher movie. With Gallant at the wheel, telling jokes over her shoulder, I enjoy being aesthetically carsick. The exhaust fuming off her pages, reeking of life’s absurdities and pathos, is invigorating.” (Rob Shaeffer, Great Barrington, Mass.)
And in The Economist, a culture column without a byline mined many adults’ apprehensions about the books to which their children are exposed: “Reading is dangerously independent. It offers children their first escape from their parents. Go into Narnia or Neverland or Wonderland and you — like Lucy or Peter Pan or Alice — go alone. And what you see there will shape you: Forever after you will know what lies behind the wardrobe door (furs and firs), what eating Turkish delight leads to (trouble) and what to do with bottles saying ‘DRINK ME’ (don’t).” (Antony Shugaar, Washington, D.C.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Writing, Watching and Listening To
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Trump’s second Inaugural Address, like his first eight years ago, was less about sowing inspiration than about serving notice and settling scores. I wrote this quick analysis of it that Times Opinion published fast on the heels of its conclusion.
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Streaming services have become more and more aggressive about resurfacing old content and luring you in. That’s the only way I can explain the scattered hours that I recently squandered watching most of the first season of “Banshee,” which is available on Max and originally aired on Cinemax in 2013. The very tall tale of a cartoonishly virile ex-con who hides from a flamboyantly eccentric crime lord by posing as a sheriff in an Amish town informally run by a merciless ex-Amish thug, it plays like a dare constructed by unhinged screenwriters trying to squeeze as much violence and nudity as possible into every hour. I’m not exactly recommending it — I bailed after eight episodes — but I tip my hat to its gonzo glory.
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Some friends and I were talking recently about the best live music performances we’d ever attended, and it was my turn to name a standout. I flashed back to two Queen concerts, to a Led Zeppelin concert, to Rush, to a whole pantheon of rock’s biggest bands. But here’s what came out of my mouth: “Toni Childs.” She had a passage of some prominence in the late 1980s, with the album “Union,” and the early 1990s, with the album “House of Hope.” I caught her in a tiny venue in downtown Manhattan when she was touring to promote “Union.” If my memory is correct, she stood alone or almost alone on a not-quite-stage, singing to prerecorded music. And she was stunning. She had a singular voice — at once throaty and chesty and thunderous in the most peculiar way. I’m now listening to and enjoying her anew — her old stuff, I mean, not the newer, lesser fare. (She’s still around.) To discover if she’s for you, check out, from “Union,” the songs “Stop Your Fussin,” “Don’t Walk Away” and “Zimbabwae,” and from “House of Hope,” the title track, “Heaven’s Gate” and “I Want to Walk With You.”
On a Personal Note
There was a part of me — a very big part of me — that fumed and sulked as all those former or about-to-be-former presidents and vice presidents and their spouses marched calmly into the Capitol Rotunda on Monday to see Trump sworn in. As they dutifully took their seats. As they summoned tiny smiles.
After all the hideous insults and hyperbolic threats that he had hurled at Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence, Barack Obama and the others, how could they muster such respect?
The explanation, of course, isn’t that they felt they owed it to him. They felt they owed it to America. It was a willed equanimity in the service of democratic stability.
It was also something else: a testament to the human ability to compartmentalize. In a given moment and even for long periods of time, we can put our sorrow about our circumstances, our fury at an injustice, our disagreements with our companions or our outright contempt for someone deep in a box and seal it tight so that we needn’t look at it, so that we don’t have to feel it, so that we buck up, so that we move on. It’s one of our superpowers.
But is it also our kryptonite? When are we sagely making a tentative peace with imperfection and wisely recognizing the present limits of our agency and when are we foolishly blunting the imperative to act? Figuring that out can be as crucial to thriving — and to surviving — as just about anything else. It’s a big challenge in our personal and professional lives. In our political lives, it will loom large indeed in the years ahead.
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