With Donald Trump back in the White House, Americans should brace themselves for fresh abuses of history. Indeed, the rewriting of the past has already begun. Mere hours after swearing his oath, Trump signed an executive order granting pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 individuals convicted of federal crimes related to the January 6 insurrection.
With a stroke of his Sharpie, Trump scrubbed what the FBI had characterized as an act of domestic terrorism and reconstrued the attack as an outpouring of patriotic valor. Instead of affirming the crime and offering mercy, Trump grants absolution and proclaims a monopoly on truth.
The expansive scope of Trump’s pardon reportedly took some of his own aides by surprise. The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement union in the country has denounced the decision. Meanwhile, three federal judges have criticized the order, with one calling it “a revisionist myth” and another saying the pardon “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
Even Pamela Hemphill, the so-called “MAGA granny,” refused Trump’s pardon, saying “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative.”
Of course, Trump’s repeated falsehoods, including his insistence that no one was killed at the Capitol, mirror the propaganda techniques used by other autocrats. In a healthier information ecosystem, the lies he peddles would be ridiculed as strongman kitsch. As it stands, they are increasingly accommodated.
According to a recent NPR report, official tours of the Capitol—each year nearly two million visit—make no mention of January 6. Similarly, the website for the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center includes no information about January 6, which even Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, at the time called “a failed insurrection.”
Across the Potomac, officials at the Pentagon removed a portrait of retired Army Gen. Mark Milley from public display just hours after Trump’s swearing-in ceremony. Milley had called Trump “a threat to democracy” and “a total fascist” during the latter’s re-election campaign. The New York Times has called this move “an early salvo by the new administration against [the] military establishment.” More than this, it is another example of Trump removing from the historical record the things he cannot accept.