Trump Can’t Rewrite History, No Matter How Hard He Tries

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“Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note” is coming out on Tuesday instead of Thursday this week, out of respect for President Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral will be held on Thursday. 

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For four years and counting, President-elect Donald Trump has been trying to rewrite history.

You don’t have to look far to find it:

  • “A Day of Love”: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6 – The New York Times
  • Trump Won the Presidency – and the Narrative About January 6 – Vanity Fair
  • Trump’s Propaganda Victory: The Rewriting Of Jan. 6 – HuffPost

But history is not written by the participants nor is it written in the present.

History is written by historians and independent observers who are able to look back over periods of time to provide clarity, context, and truth.

When the true history of January 6 is written, Trump’s self-serving efforts to replace fact with his fiction will fail.

History will have evidence beyond any doubt that Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election that he clearly lost. History will show that neither Trump nor anyone else presented any evidence that supported his false claim that the election was stolen from him.

History will have evidence beyond any doubt that, on January 6, 2021, Trump incited a mob to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power and attack the United States Capitol.

History will have the detailed report of the House Jan. 6 Committee and sworn testimony under oath of eyewitnesses and key players about what happened on January 6 and the days leading up to it.

History will have powerful and incontrovertible videos that show the story of the violence that unfolded at the Capitol that day.

History will have the documented information about how 140 police officers were attacked by the mob, with officers suffering severe injuries, including major head trauma, spinal injuries, cracked ribs, and stab wounds.

History will have the court records and facts regarding the approximately 1,009 attackers at the Capitol who pled guilty to felonies or misdemeanors; the 221 attackers who were found guilty in contested criminal trials; the 608 attackers who were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement; and those who received the most serious sentences for violent crimes or seditious conspiracy, ranging from 10 to 22 years in prison.

Trump’s view of these convicted criminals? It would be his “great honor,” he said last May, “to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters, or as I often call them, the hostages … a group of people treated so harshly or unfairly.”

Last month, Trump said he will begin pardoning these convicted criminals beginning on Day One of his presidency. If he does so, it will be a disgraceful affront to our democracy and to the police officers who were injured on January 6.

History also should have the information laid out in the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on the Trump Jan. 6 case and the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Smith is expected to deliver his report momentarily to Attorney General Merrick Garland, as required by Justice Department regulations. Garland can make this report public. However, Judge Aileen Cannon today temporarily blocked the public release of the report.

(You may remember that Cannon was reversed twice in the documents case by conservative judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and she has created the appearance of bias toward Trump in her rulings in the case.)

In 2023, the 306-page unclassified report of the Special Counsel investigation into the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was publicly released by Garland.

It is essential that the Smith report similarly be made available to the public and for historical purposes.

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“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time,” is a line that has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

In the case of Trump, he has fooled a number of people with his Jan. 6 fantasies, but he will not be able to fool history.

History will never buy Trump’s false narrative about January 6 and the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him.

Trump’s attack on the 2020 presidential election and our democracy, his attempted presidential coup, and his incitement of a violent mob attack on the Capitol, will be written into the history books, no matter how hard he tries to rewrite it.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.