WASHINGTON — It took decades for defenders of the Confederacy to rewrite the history of the Civil War to recast Southern rebels’ treasonous attack against the United States as an act of honour and courage.
It took Donald Trump a mere fraction of that time to accomplish the same feat for his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
In a mere four years, that day’s effort to end or, at the very least, suspend American democracy with a deadly assault on the Capitol, incited by Trump himself, has for a large swath of the country instead become a peaceful protest whose participants have been persecuted by Trump’s political opponents.
“What they have in common is that in both cases a story is propagated that a portion of the population wants to hear because it absolves them, or those in their in-group, of a transgression of not just the law, but of commonly held moral principles,” said Gabriel Reich, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who has studied how the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction is taught in schools.
“Liberal democracies really struggle with bad-faith actors who manipulate existing rules and norms to their own benefit,” he added.
Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who served on the staff of the House Jan. 6 committee and was a co-author of its report, said he still finds it hard to believe that people could watch what happened that day unfold on television and then still accept Trump’s version of it. Unlike children growing up in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, for whom the Civil War was generations in the past, Trump’s followers and allies are rejecting readily available evidence of contemporary violence.
“All you need is the images and the videos from that day, his own words, and what you saw with your own eyes, and it was clear that he had crossed some bright lines,” he said. “All of that should have been disqualifying, and it wasn’t.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to HuffPost queries. Even since his win in November, Trump has continued to lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from him and has described those who have been prosecuted for their actions on Jan. 6 as political prisoners.
“These people have been treated really, really badly,” he told Time magazine last month. “They’ve suffered greatly, and in many cases they should not have suffered.”
Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican political consultant in Florida, said he remembers as a child reading a plaque honoring dead Confederate soldiers in his town square. “That’s the way we grew up. That’s what we knew,” he said.
That Trump was able to revise his own history so quickly is a noteworthy achievement, he added.
“It is a tribute to Trump and his posse’s ability to convince half the country,” Stipanovich said. “And it is a telling indictment of the intelligence of that half of the country.”
From Protecting Slavery To The Honourable ‘Lost Cause’
When America elected the leader of a party dedicated to abolishing slavery as president, 11 Southern states decided to secede and started a war against those that remained. That these rebel states would lose was likely inevitable, given the Union’s industrial might and population advantage, and 700,000 deaths later, they did.
Yet within a few short years, an effort to reinvent that loss and the motivations behind it began. Confederate sympathizers and segregationists in academia, the media and politics cast men like Robert E. Lee — officers in the US Army who had taken up arms against the United States — as tragic American heroes. And the reason behind the war, the preservation of human slavery, was replaced with a principled defence of “states’ rights” — even though slavery was plainly cited in the states’ own articles of secession.
“They made sure that teachers, including university-level historians, taught that story as historical truth, while simultaneously suppressing other points of view from the media,” VCU’s Reich said.
It took decades of repetition, replete with the construction of statues and memorials to the leaders of the failed insurrection, but this “Lost Cause” myth eventually became an accepted narrative, primarily in the South but to a lesser extent all over the country. So much so that some US military bases in the first half of the 20th century were named for Confederate officers.
Trump’s propaganda campaign to redefine Jan. 6, in contrast, has taken place at lightning speed.
On Jan. 6 itself and in the days immediately afterward, the early consensus was that Trump had incited the attack on the Capitol and that he was wrong to do so. Republican congressional leaders blamed him in floor speeches. Trump himself on Jan. 7 read prepared remarks warning members of his mob: “To those who broke the law, you will pay.”
Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, expressed the conventional wisdom at the time that Trump was finished. “I think he’s lost any sort of political viability he was going to have,” she told Politico on Jan. 12.
Four years later, Trump is about to return to the same White House he left in disgrace. His new administration will be stocked with those willing to repeat and spread his continuing lies about the 2020 election. And he has promised not only to pardon those prosecuted for taking part in the Jan. 6 attack but to prosecute those who tried to hold him and his followers to account.
The Triumph Of The Repeated Lie
That Trump was able to return to power, despite everything, was perhaps foreseeable because he never lost the loyalty of the Republican primary voting base.
Indeed, the day after his coup attempt had failed, the overwhelming majority of the 163 members of the Republican National Committee gave him a sustained ovation when he called into their winter meeting in Amelia Island, Florida.
Three weeks later, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, at the time the country’s highest-ranking elected Republican, visited Trump at his South Florida country club, effectively signalling that Trump remained the party’s leader. Two weeks after that, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, while lambasting Trump for his behaviour leading up to and on Jan. 6, nonetheless voted not to convict Trump for inciting the insurrection following his House impeachment for that offence. A conviction would have been followed by a vote to ban him from federal office for life.
By April, the RNC was again holding fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, putting donors’ money into his personal bank account. Officials acknowledged privately that Trump remained their biggest fundraising draw and that they had to go along with the fiction that the 2020 election had been stolen because their voters believed it to be true — even though the only reason for that belief was Trump’s lies.
And by the end of 2021, following the release of conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson’s “documentary” claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was actually a “false flag” operation by the FBI, Trump began calling those under prosecution for taking part in his coup attempt — even the hundreds convicted for having assaulted police officers — “hostages” and “political prisoners.”
Republican candidates for offices large and small in increasing numbers made pilgrimages to Palm Beach to win his endorsement. Journalists similarly made the trek — not to ask about his unprecedented attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power, but about his candidacy to regain the presidency in 2024.
The new “Lost Cause” myth for Jan. 6 was complete.
“It’s disheartening,” Joscelyn said.
Stipanovich, who broke from the Republican Party when it embraced Trump in 2016, said that a more apt — and troubling — comparison to Trump’s rewriting of Jan. 6 may be the way Adolf Hitler and the Nazis remade their 1923 Beer Hall Putsch into a valiant act of patriotism, rather than an attempted coup that sent Hitler and others to prison.
“When it failed, the heroes of the failure became the hope of the future,” he said.
Whatever the appropriate historical analogy, the fact that Trump was able to assault democracy as he did and still come back to power is worrisome, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. Sabato also grew up in that state, where the Civil War was taught as the “War of Northern Aggression.”
“The Lost Cause was a ‘big lie,’ but I’m not so sure Trump’s ‘big lie’ will ever be a lost cause,” he warned. “This is not cynicism. It’s the reality we face.”