Francis Wilkinson: MAGA’s Jan. 6 stories are taking a more dangerous turn

The construction of the MAGA counternarrative about Jan. 6 has been something of an iterative process. The latest version, which exists alongside multiple alternate versions, is contained in a report by Republican Representative Barry Loudermilk’s House subcommittee, released in late December amid the House GOP/Elon Musk/Donald Trump chaos over funding the government. As its title suggests, Loudermilk’s “Interim Report on the Failures and Politization of the Jan. 6 Select Committee” is probably not the final account.

Loudermilk’s report focuses on the workings of the House Jan. 6 select committee, and the voluminous fact pattern that the committee established about Donald Trump’s role in the attempted overthrow of the American republic. (End democratic elections, and you end the republic.) This is a departure from previous MAGA concoctions, which sought to recast the events of the day itself.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, some MAGA partisans attributed the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol to radical leftists. “Now, they were likely not all Trump supporters,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said of the mob, hours after she had pleaded with the White House to call off the Capitol assault. Ingraham then added, “and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”

The story of Black Lives Matter or Antifa activists dressed as violent red-capped white men (to throw the feds off their scent) filled a momentary need. Then, Antifa and BLM were dropped from the storyline and the feds themselves became the conspirators, with undercover FBI agents inciting innocent Trump supporters to engage in violence as a means to discredit Trump. Fox contributor Monica Crowley posted on social media last January, “3 years ago today, the System manufactured a riot at the Capitol to crush the powerful America First movement, frame President @realDonaldTrump and prevent him from winning again.” Trump reshared that post. Now he says he will appoint Crowley the chief of protocol at the U.S. Department of State, thus endorsing her whitewash of his own lies about the violence.

In this new report, Loudermilk remixes the brew to prepare for the retaliation phase. He largely sidesteps the most preposterous claims. He didn’t even make much effort to rehabilitate the Trump fans who attacked the Capitol, many or all of whom Trump has vowed to pardon in his campaign to transform violent criminals into passionate patriots.

Instead, Loudermilk retraced the investigative skein of the Jan. 6 committee in an effort to discredit its evidence, conclusions and, most of all, its chief spokeswoman, former GOP Representative Liz Cheney. In the course of her Jan. 6 select committee duties Cheney had pointed out that Loudermilk had led a tour of the Capitol the day before Jan. 6, when the building was ostensibly closed to the public. One tourist’s keen interest in a Capitol stairwell – not a typical highlight – attracted Cheney’s attention.

Loudermilk claims that Cheney engaged in witness tampering in the course of breaking “numerous federal laws.” The report identifies Cheney as implacably hostile to Trump. It also devotes dozens of pages to the security failure of Jan. 6. Yet the report leaves two essential mysteries unresolved.

What caused the third-highest-ranking member of the House Republican Conference, a woman on track to be House Speaker or perhaps more, to turn against an honest and true man like Donald Trump and commit terrible crimes against MAGA?

What exactly happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that exposed the security failures?

The answers to these mysteries are beyond Loudermilk’s investigative ken. Cheney apparently just up and went antifa, destroying her high-flying GOP career for no particular reason. (One MAGA explanation is ambition. Just don’t ask how taking stands guaranteed to end her career served her ambition.) As for security, something was definitely awry at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But the who and why and at whose instigation are not the sort of questions a busy congressman has time to entertain.

Indeed, the only thing we know for certain from this report is that Trump is blameless for anything bad that may or may not have happened that day. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi is largely at fault, with an assist from the Pentagon, which failed to send troops to rectify Pelosi’s personal failure to prepare for whatever untoward events may have occurred.

Like much MAGA hackwork, Loudermilk’s report has a plodding, Soviet quality. It starts from the premise that Comrade Cheney committed thought crimes and proceeds to politburo its way to its inevitable conclusion – the need to charge the MAGA apostate. Cheney helping former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson break free of her MAGA-funded lawyer becomes the chief basis for the charge that Cheney tampered with a witness.

Hutchinson also gets a turn. “Among the many unsubstantiated claims made by Hutchinson throughout her interactions with Representative Cheney and the Select Committee, Hutchinson proclaimed that she was ‘disgusted’ by President Trump’s actions and called his activity ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘un-American.’ ” Calling Hutchinson’s personal opinions, including her own account of her own feelings of disgust, “unsubstantiated” is comic enough. But the report promptly follows its “unsubstantiated” with this: “Before the Select Committee was formed, President Trump had heard negative things about Hutchinson, including that she was “a total phony and ‘leaker.’ ”

Any “negative things” that Trump has “heard” are, by MAGA definition, substantiated. So it’s confirmed: Hutchinson is a phony baloney and nasty woman.

Hutchinson, however, does not pose a problem as significant as Cheney, who will surely be a target of MAGA apparatchiks in the next administration. She is a living indictment of her colleagues’ cowardice and corruption. Cheney’s prophesy – “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain” – will appear in history books long after the serial fictions of MAGA are forgotten.

Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump for his attempted overthrow of the republic marked her for destruction long before the Jan. 6 select committee took shape. One month after the impeachment vote, her home-state Republicans in Wyoming voted to censure Cheney. A few months after that, the House GOP removed her from her leadership post.

In its February 2021 complaint against Cheney, the Wyoming state GOP noted that “ample video evidence suggests the riot at the capital was instigated by Antifa and BLM radicals.”

The state party has never bothered to update the antifa line, now preserved in an amber of deceit. That’s what happens when a party is not just degenerate and authoritarian but also highly decentralized. The GOP’s central party bureaucracy can’t ensure fealty to party lies across all its subgroups and auxiliaries. Fox News can only do so much. Party leaders improvise; party regulars adapt. Different lies coexist across different time zones. It’s as close to jazz as the GOP is ever likely to get.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy.