In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, there seemed at least a slim chance that the Republican Party would finally come to its senses. The rioters that former President Donald Trump had urged toward Congress to threaten the electoral vote counting had left GOP stalwarts shaken. It was a window for finally rejecting Trump and the lies he’d been peddling about widespread fraud in the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
But that window quickly closed as Republicans shifted into a defensive stance. Three years later, Trump is the front-runner to claim the GOP nomination for the third election in a row. And a new poll from The Washington Post and University of Maryland shows that Republican voters are more sympathetic than ever toward the Jan. 6 mob and the man who pushed them into action. And while it’s tempting to place the blame for that solely on Trump’s shoulders and the MAGA faithful, the supposed “moderate” wing of the Republican Party shares complicity in these results.
As my colleague Steve Benen pointed out on Tuesday, one of the most troubling findings in the poll is that Republican support for Trump’s election lies have trended in the wrong direction for the country. When asked last month, only 31% of self-identified Republicans told pollsters that they believe Biden’s election was legitimate. That’s down from 39% of Republicans in a poll the Post conducted in December 2021.
That drop can be partially chalked up to the continuing reach of the conspiracy theories that Trump circulated after losing the election in 2020. Far-right politicians and media figures also boosted claims that would exonerate Trump, no matter how outlandish. Even fully debunked claims like the idea that Georgia election workers were pulling fake ballots out of suitcases are still canon events among Republicans, according to voters the Post interviewed.
And then there’s former Fox New host Tucker Carlson’s selective editing of security footage from the Capitol — which he received from former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Carlson’s edited tapes helped promote the narrative that the rioters were actually “mostly peaceful,” no matter what the findings of the House Jan. 6 committee and other investigations say. In the Post poll, only 18% of respondents said that the people who entered the Capitol were “mostly violent,” down from 26% two years earlier.
But the poll’s most discouraging results were the throngs of Republicans who believe that the country should simply “move on” from the Jan. 6 attack. It’s a stance that has become orthodoxy within the GOP. Seventy-two percent of the Republicans polled think that “too much is being made of the storming” of the Capitol, compared to just 24% who agreed that it was an “attack on democracy that should never be forgotten.”
Those results echo the timidity of the Republicans who remain outside of the MAGA sphere of influence — or at least are desperate not to alienate them. Look no further than the string of supposed contenders for the 2024 nomination who insist that the charges that Trump faces for his role in launching the attack are evidence of Democrats’ “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. The same goes for those who have tried to characterize the Jan. 6 committee’s investigations as partisan, ignoring the two Republicans who agreed to participate signing off on them.
Similarly, GOP elites have taken every chance possible the last three years to try to redirect the country’s attention away from the attacks and toward something a bit more electorally palatable. “We need to be talking about the future and not the past,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said back in October 2021. “It’s my hope that the ‘22 election will be a referendum on the performance of the current administration, not a rehash of suggestions about what may have happened in 2020.”
In a way, this ongoing plea to look toward the future is more insidious than the conspiracy theories. There’s something seemingly noble in calling to let the past stay in the past and to forge ahead — but to do so without learning any lessons is simply begging for the past to repeat itself. Suggesting that the country move forward without grappling with its immediate history offers absolution without repentance, allowing voters to turn a blind eye to the reality of what occurred and the threat to democracy that Trump poses.
It says a lot that this position is the centrist take among Republicans, even those like McConnell who have correctly characterized the attack as a “violent insurrection.” They prefer not to talk about Jan. 6, from the few denouncing Trump to the many actively calling the Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners” or “hostages.” And yet it remains every bit as dishonest, a lie by omission. Without forcefully pushing back on the factors that led to the Jan. 6 attack, there’s no room for plausible deniability when Trump tries to subvert the next election as well.
Thankfully, the poll is a bit less horrifying outside of the ranks of the GOP. Democrats and, to a lesser degree, independents are more unified than Republicans when it comes to the seriousness of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s attempt to overturn an election. It’s encouraging that a majority of Americans believe that Jan. 6 was a turning point in our country’s history that can’t be ignored. But without buy-in from Republicans, especially those who have preferred to stay quiet, the reconciliation that would allow the country to truly move on is a long way away.
