We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot – David Bowie
Hey, remember January 6, 2021?
We saw all kinds of crazy shit go down in Washington, DC that day, before the use of the word “unprecedented” became, well, precedented. When a mob of MAGA-supporters smashed their way into the US Capitol threatening to hang Mike Pence, it felt for sure like everything was about to change.
It did, of course, and not at all in the way we imagined.
At the time, I wrote that the chaos at the Capitol was “the natural endgame” for Donald T***p’s political ambitions.
Boy, did I get that wrong. We all did. By “we” I mean myself, legions of media pundits and an awful lot of ordinary Americans who assumed a red line had been crossed that meant the end forever of Donald T***p’s career in public life.
For a brief moment America seemed united in its disgust over that day – the New York Times front page shouted “TRUMP INCITES MOB” in all caps, The Washington Post called it “pathetic and horrifying,” and even the conservative Wall Street Journal called for the President to resign. “It is best for everyone, himself included, if he goes away quietly,” the Journal said.
Spoiler alert: That didn’t happen.
Instead, it was a catapult that launched T***p’s forever campaign, an endless array of grievances and shadowy claims that directly led to his re-election as president in 2024. Without the fuel of January 6, T***p Version 2.0 probably could never have happened.
He simply never stopped. He dug in, and an army of acolytes – some true believers, some out to cash in – carried on the “stop the steal” chant even in the face of evidence the 2020 election was decisive and fair.
Joe Biden’s four years in office now feel like a brief strange pause amid the grip of T***pism, an era that will likely extend for more than a decade of American life.
Like almost everyone, I am so very, very sick of writing about, of thinking about this man that I don’t even want to type out his name in full anymore. Post-November 2024 I just kind of gave up on politics in my home country, and in the time I’ve got left I’m determined to spend as little of it as I can doomscrolling. Which is tricky if you’re a journalist, but there’s always something else to cover.
We thought – I thought – that January 6 would be the end of him, that the natural order of shame, exile and moving on would all fall into place, but instead, it was the dark overture to everything that just kept coming next. Truth has eroded. Falsehoods and AI-churned misinformation grows by the day, and the fictions stack up so completely that it seems impossible to find a path out.
In the end, America kind of broke my heart that January day, five years ago now. And the worst part of it all is what happened after that day, about how what we all saw with our own eyes was excused, pardoned, retconned and obliterated instead of the forever stain it really should be.
We have learned in these past five years that repetition beats reason, that a narrative can be hammered so relentlessly that it reshapes our impression of history itself.
I wonder when that day will truly end.
And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Nik Dirga 