Five years after the January 6 insurrection, the insidious counternarrative President Donald Trump’s MAGA media allies pieced together to excuse his conduct is the official position of the White House. In a sign of how firmly that revisionism has taken hold, on Tuesday, right-wing commentators largely parroted the Trump line on the storming of the U.S. Capitol, mocked those who care about that assault on American democracy, or remained silent.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, he initiated a well-telegraphed plot to use baseless claims of widespread fraud to subvert the vote and remain in power. Right-wing media, led by Fox News, championed his often deranged conspiracy theories, though Fox executives and hosts privately acknowledged they knew he had been defeated and his claims otherwise were lies. 

The final phase of Trump’s seditious scheme involved getting Vice President Mike Pence to defy the U.S. Constitution and throw out slates of electoral votes from several states Trump had lost during the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. Pence refused to follow Trump’s legally preposterous entreaties — but a mob of Trump supporters, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and inflamed by his rants about a rigged election, stormed the U.S. Capitol. The Trumpists injured scores of law enforcement officers and sent Pence and members of Congress into hiding before order was restored and the electoral votes were successfully counted. 

Politicians of both parties, major corporations, and journalists of all stripes agreed in the immediate aftermath of January 6 that these events were horrific, and that Trump had been responsible. But Fox News and the right-wing media began chipping away at that fragile consensus almost immediately as a way of excusing Trump’s culpability — and their own. That 1/6 Truth movement, led by Tucker Carlson, produced an insidious counternarrative in which the protesters were righteous victims of overzealous law enforcement, helping to shore up Trump’s support and return him to office. And Trump, in turn, has purged from the GOP Pence and others who opposed his election subversion, and granted clemency to the 1,500 “J6 hostages” charged or convicted for crimes related to the insurrection.

On Tuesday, the White House celebrated the anniversary of January 6 with a splashy webpage laying out the false right-wing counternarrative of those events. The page celebrates those who stormed the U.S. Capitol “to protest a stolen election,” argues that “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election,” blames Democrats and the Capitol Police for the violence that day, and condemns Pence’s refusal to end American democracy as a “betrayal of the president.”

Commentators on the right — including those on the right who once damned Trump’s role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol — show little interest in pushing back on these lies. Some have adopted the false narrative whole hog, while others have either seemingly made their peace with what he did or been effectively purged from the movement. 

Newsmax champions the deranged White House counternarrative

For years, Newsmax personalities have propagated deranged conspiracy theories about January 6. As the attack on the Capitol was still unfolding, hosts and guests already began spreading false claims that the rioters were “antifa,” that Trump supporters had been infiltrated by “leftist groups,” or that George Soros was behind it.

Newsmax’s prime-time coverage on the fifth anniversary of the Capitol attack focused on parroting the Trump administration’s deranged narrative. 

“Today marks five years since the libs attempted to stage a riot on January 6, 2021, the day the mainstream media still call an insurrection,” host Carl Higbie said. “But for millions of patriots, it was the day they peacefully stood up against election fraud and got shot by paintballs and tear gas before a single person even entered the Capitol building. Over 1,500 Americans were prosecuted in the largest political witch hunt ever. Grandmas were jailed for praying inside the Capitol after being let in, where they walked between the ropes nonviolently.” 

Newsmax host Greg Kelly smeared Capitol Police officers who were assaulted that day, calling them liars and “drama queens.” (Kelly has a long history of attacking Capitol Police in the wake of January 6, and he celebrated Trump’s blanket pardon for January 6 defendants at the start of his second term.) Other network hosts dismissed the violence and mocked Democratic politicians who pointed it out. In the final prime-time hour, host Chris Plante said that “really Pelosi is more responsible for the results of that day — the way that day came out — than even the protesters, who were mostly peaceful.”  

Fox hosts mock those who still care

Fox’s slate of propagandists, rather than simply parroting the White House’s counternarrative on January 6, chose to mock those who still care about the events of that day. 

Hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity had privately begged then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to get Trump to stop the violence, messages released by the House Select Committee on January 6 show. 

But on Tuesday’s broadcasts, both of them made fun of Democratic members of Congress who participated in a vigil marking the events of that day. Ingraham said Democrats were “celebrating January 6” because “they thought that was their high point,” while Hannity sneered that Democrats were “stuck in 2021” and that their “very solemn candlelight vigil” was “worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit.”

Fox host Jesse Watters joined in on the mockery, characterizing January 6 as the “Democratic Super Bowl.”  

Others who once knew better remain silent

Other right-wing outlets who initially condemned Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection simply did not address the anniversary on Tuesday. 

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” 

The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” 

And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.” 

But none of those editorial boards weighed in on the fifth anniversary of those events; with that battle apparently lost, they are now fighting a rear-guard action over whether Trump, returned to power, will use the U.S. military to seize Greenland from our NATO ally Denmark.