It’s Official: Donald Trump Won the 2020 Election

“how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.”—Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics” (1971).

Readers of this piece might remember 2020 as a time of widespread vulnerability and anxiety. Confusion, even.

American citizens went to the polls that November in record numbers to vote in an extremely heated election that pitted challenger Joe Biden against then-President Donald Trump. Trump—whose presidency was marked by scandal, impeachment, an atrocious response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a violent response to Black Lives Matter protests—sought reelection on the basis of a campaign driven by fear, anger, and resentment. At a time of chaos, Biden stood for the Constitution, normality, and basic decency.

The struggle of authoritarian power against freedom is the struggle of forgetting against memory.

The contrast was clear, and the contest bitter. It was days after the election before all votes were tallied in the swing states that would decide the winner. But by November 7 all major media outlets, led by Fox News, called the election for Biden, and in the days that followed, it was clear to virtually every serious journalist, legal expert, and election official that Biden had won.

As constitutional law required, state governments certified Biden’s election, the Electoral College confirmed his election, Congress validated his election, he was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, and he went on to serve, for four years and until a few short days ago, as the 46th president of the United States.

There was only one problem: Donald Trump, his MAGA Republican party in tow, refused to recognize the result.

Trump did more than denounce the election. In the closing months of his term, he conspired to overturn it. When his efforts failed, he summoned his supporters to the Capitol for an angry demonstration, incited the crowd to march on the Capitol, and stood by as thousands of his supporters violently attacked and entered the Capitol and attempted to disrupt the constitutionally prescribed lawful and peaceful transfer of power.

That day that will go down in infamy as “January 6.” Or not.

Readers might recall these events, painstakingly documented by a bipartisan House Select Committee report and a Justice Department indictment.

It all happened.

But did it?

Moments in time evaporate. Events pass. Memories fade. And truth—always precarious and especially so in a culture of simulation and dissimulation—is an easy casualty of the cynical.

No individual is more cynical than Donald Trump, none more craven than the MAGA Republican party that supports him, and none more credulous than the millions upon millions of Fox News-watching and Joe Rogan-listening Americans who adore him.

And in less than a week in office, Trump has commenced the process of officially erasing the truth not simply about January 6, 2021, but about the last four years.

That is the essential meaning of his blanket pardon and commutation of all prosecutions, convictions, and sentences related to January 6, officially announced thus: “This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation.”

For four years, Trump has insisted that the 2020 election was stolen, that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president, and that Democrats were radical Marxist haters of America who had hijacked the government and subjected the American people to a tyrannical occupation (all of these are things that Trump has repeatedly said). And he has described the January 6 insurrectionists as virtuous citizens who were repressed by an evil regime determined to “weaponize” government, and as “hostages” of the occupying enemy power that was the Biden administration.

This week, these outrageous claims became the official position of the U.S. government.

Trump has freed the “hostages,” restoring MAGA-style American civic virtue in the opening gambit of the campaign of recrimination, retribution, and repression that will define his presidency.

Thus liberated, the “hostages” can now stand back and stand by in support of Their Leader. Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio, and other leaders of the insurrection, have made no bones about this. As one of the Justice Department attorneys who prosecuted the insurrectionists has noted, “The effect—and I believe purpose—of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government.”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) has announced the creation of a new House subcommittee to investigate January 6, 2021. As NBC Newsreports: “‘House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,’ Johnson said in a statement. The subcommittee’s mission is to ‘uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people,’ Johnson said.”

The “truth” at which this committee will arrive, there can be no doubt, will be a simple one, easily digested by Trump’s plebeian base: that “January 6” was a noble effort to defend “election integrity” that was brutally repressed by the deep state, and that after the American people have suffered for four years under the tyrannical yoke of Biden the Woke Marxist Usurper, their popular sovereignty has finally been restored by the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

On this view, last November’s election was thus much more than a conventional repudiation of an unpopular incumbent president via the electoral process. It was the victorious return of the man, the leader, the Fuhrer, who by rights should never have been forced to leave the White House in the first place.

This is now the Uber narrative of Trump’s presidency, from which Trump’s many rash, cruel, and often manifestly unconstitutional executive orders contemptuously flow.

And by “Trump’s presidency,” I do not mean simply the term of office that commenced last week. I mean the entire period since January 6, 2017. From that day to this, Donald Trump has claimed the presidency, and his political party and his many millions of followers have embraced and loudly reiterated this claim. (Do you not recall that during the entire four years Biden occupied the White House, every Trump supporter consistently referred to him as “President Trump” and even “the President?”) With his return to the White House, this claim, in a sense, is vindicated, as the Biden years already begin to feel like a brief, and aberrational, interlude in The Age of Trump.

As clearly anticipated by the Project 2025 Agenda crafted by Russ Vought and Stephen Miller, Trump will now “restore” justice at Justice by using every possible means to threaten, harass, investigate, and prosecute the “enemies of the people” who had the temerity to refuse his dictatorship. (The executive order under which this will occur bears the appropriately Orwellian name “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”). Are the members of the House J-6 Committee pardoned by Biden safe? Is Biden himself safe? Or Jack Smith, or Merrick Garland, or even Mark Esper? There will be retribution. This much is clear.

In the meantime, Trump has already commenced his plan to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants; to revoke birthright citizenship; to purge the federal government of all career civil servants suspected of actual or potential “disloyalty”; and to purge public education and academic institutions of all forms of teaching, and learning that interfere with “American Greatness.”

Back in a widely covered 2023 Veteran’s Day Speech, Trump promised that, when elected, “we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” declaring that “they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream... the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.” Commentators immediately observed that Trump was “echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.” Because he was echoing those dictators, and signaling an intention to follow their example, not simply by constricting civil and political space and punishing political opponents, but by also attempting an extreme form of ideological domination centered on the wholesale redescription of public service as treason, insurrection as patriotism, and Donald Trump as the avatar of American Greatness whose authority is beyond question.

Years ago, commenting on an earlier experience of authoritarianism, famed Czech novelist Milan Kundera famously observed that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The obverse is equally true: the struggle of authoritarian power against freedom is the struggle of forgetting against memory.

It is bad enough that Trump was able to win the 2024 election.

He has already begun to do great harm. More will surely follow.

But if he can succeed in claiming the 2020 election as well, then we are truly doomed.

It sure looks like he is succeeding.