January 6 gets a downgrade
“The deeper problem with Trump as a fascist is that it lets the rest of society off the hook.”
Washington — January 6, 2025. This Monday is a bitter blur. Caked by layers of snow and the stillness of a city still pulling itself out of the holiday lull. January 6, for anyone who lives here or partakes in politics, is a date associated with just one event that needs no further illumination. And yet four years later it stands as a day that codified an election that has muddled the meaning of *the* January 6. September 11, 2001 sparked the invasion of two countries, transformed the national security and surveillance state, along with the nation’s psyche, and planted the seeds of cynical deception that fomented the anti-establishmentarian backlash among the populace which allowed for the unforeseen and (once laughable) rise of one Donald J. Trump. September 11 is still a day universally treated as sacrosanct, and to be clear-eyed, the sheer loss of life and impact of that day is singular in this American century. But with Trump’s unambiguous victory and return to power, January 6, 2021 seems ready to be purged from the memory of The Majority. “I don’t believe it will be a national holiday. I
believe it will be a partisan holiday, which is two different things,” CNN commentator Scott Jennings said on his Flyover Country podcast Monday. Jared Crawford, Jennings’ PR and podcast colleague, asserted that Jan. 6 should forever going forward be considered a normal day, one in which power is peacefully transferred without a hitch. “This day, being kind of forgettable, is almost exactly what most Americans should want. Like we shouldn’t have to think about these days,” Crawford said. Vice President Kamala Harris assisted with that ethos today, presiding over and later describing the certification of Trump’s Electoral College victory as “what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted.” And it’s that dissonance — that Trump paid no political price for the riotous event of that