SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
election 2020
It’s Official: Donald Trump Won the 2020 Election
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.
Jan 27, 2025
“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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Rewarding Political Violence,' Felon Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Insurrectionists
"This move not only erases accountability for one of the darkest days in our nation's history but also emboldens far-right extremists and grants them free license to continue their ideological reign of terror," said one critic.
Jan 20, 2025
Democracy defenders on Monday night swiftly condemned U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pardon roughly 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and commute the sentences of some others.
The widely anticipated move, which Trump made with television cameras in the Oval Office, came just hours after he returned to power on Monday afternoon—despite being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year and facing various other legal cases, including for his attempts to overturn his 2020 loss to Democratic former President Joe Biden that culminated in inciting the 2021 Capitol attack.
"Just hours after promising to bring 'law and order back to our cities,' Trump pardoned more than a thousand January 6th rioters and put violent offenders right back in our neighborhoods—people who assaulted police officers, destroyed property, and tried to overturn our freedom to vote," said Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, in a statement.
"By giving January 6th rioters a free pass, Trump is rewarding political violence and making all of us less safe," he continued. "No one should be above the law in the United States of America, and our first responders and the American people deserve better than this."
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the grassroots progressive political organizing group Our Revolution, said that "Trump's pardons of January 6 rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement, mark a grave and unprecedented attack on the rule of law and American democracy. This move not only erases accountability for one of the darkest days in our nation's history but also emboldens far-right extremists and grants them free license to continue their ideological reign of terror."
"These are not patriots, these are traitors who will now be free to recruit others into what Trump views as his own personal militia," he asserted. "By granting clemency to these individuals, who sought to overturn the peaceful transfer of power, Trump is signaling that political violence and the rejection of democratic norms are acceptable tactics in service to his authoritarian agenda. This is a direct threat to the foundations of our democracy and the safety of our communities."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of watchdog Public Citizen, said that "it is perhaps on-brand that Donald Trump has kicked off his second term with an assault on our democracy, just as he ended his first term."
"This isn't just about degrading the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law in theory, his disgraceful actions here send a message that political violence is acceptable, so long as it is in support of him and his pursuit of unchecked power," she continued. "We intend to fight against these types of abuses over the next four years to maintain the integrity of the rule of law."
Accusing the Republican of "condoning insurrection," Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón similarly warned that "this will not be the last time President Trump attacks democracy" and vowed that her organization stands "ready to defend it."
During the insurrection, Kase Solomón said, "people died and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured protecting members of Congress from the attack that followed. These deaths and injuries should not be in vain. To pardon those involved is a blatant and dangerous abuse of power."
"Trump was charged with multiple crimes for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election which ended in the insurrection at the Capitol," she noted. "Only his reelection, coupled with an extremely misguided ruling from the Supreme Court on presidential immunity, allowed him to escape trial. In pardoning those who attempted to violently overturn the election and invalidate 80 million votes, Trump is showing his contempt for our justice system and our democracy."
Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who is now president of the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that "giving a pass to those who participated, all of whom were convicted after trial with ample evidence and process or pleaded guilty to crimes, sends a message that the right of the people to choose our own leaders no longer matters because the results can merely be overturned by force."
"And," he said, "it raises a terrifying question: What happens if Trump doesn't want to leave the White House at the end of his term?"
Trump commuted the sentences of Jeremy Bertino, Joseph Biggs, Thomas Caldwell, Joseph Hackett, Kenneth Harrelson, Kelly Meggs, Roberto Minuta, David Moerschel, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola, Zachary Rehl, Stewart Rhodes, Edward Vallejo, and Jessica Watkins. The others—whom Trump called "hostages"—received "a full, complete, and unconditional pardon."
"I further direct the attorney general to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021," Trump's order said. "The Bureau of Prisons shall immediately implement all instructions from the Department of Justice regarding this directive."
Shortly before leaving office on Monday, Biden issued a final wave of pardons, including for members of the U.S. House of Representatives select committee that investigated the insurrection. The Democrat said that he could not "in good conscience do nothing" to protect them and the pardons "should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense."
This post has been updated with comment from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Fumes as Final Jack Smith Report Details 'Series of Criminal Efforts to Retain Power'
"But for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial," the report states.
Jan 14, 2025
The special counsel who investigated and charged Donald Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election said in a final report released by the U.S. Justice Department early Tuesday that the former president would have been convicted for "a series of criminal efforts to retain power" had he not won another White House term in November.
"But for Mr. Trump's election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial," wrote Jack Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department late last week ahead of Inauguration Day.
Smith pointed to the Justice Department's view that "the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president," a position he said is "categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government's proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind."
The report, which Trump's legal team sought to bury, is the first of two volumes that Smith's team produced following the completion of its investigations into the former president's unlawful election interference and hoarding of classified documents. Smith dropped the two cases shortly after Trump's victory in the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department, Smith has urged that the volume on the classified documents probe not be released to the public while the case against Trump's former co-defendants is still pending.
"Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office."
In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to "induce state officials to ignore true vote counts," manufactured "fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost," directed "an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election," and leveraged "rioters' violence to further delay it."
"In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office," the report added.
Trump responded furiously to the report's release, ranting on social media that "Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his 'boss,' Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another 'Report' based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were."
In his introduction to the report, Smith rejected as "laughable" Trump's claim that the investigations were politically motivated or influenced in any way by the Biden administration.
"While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters," Smith wrote. "The facts, as we uncovered them in our investigation and as set forth in my report, matter. Experienced prosecutors know that you cannot control outcomes, you can only do your job the right way for the right reasons. I conclude our work confident that we have done so, and that we have met fully our obligations to the department and to our country."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular