This disgraceful Trump White House lie is a signpost to darker assaults

The Trump regime rolled out a new, lie-filled website this week, purporting to tell the history of the January 6 insurrection attempt. It opens with bulls--- like this (which, interestingly, appears to be 100 percent AI-generated):

“The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6, branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump — despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.

“In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power. This gaslighting narrative allowed them to persecute innocent Americans, silence opposition, and distract from their own role in undermining democracy.”

The most dangerous lies a government can tell aren’t about how tax cuts will create prosperity or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, although those were bad. When a malicious, corrupt government wants to truly break down trust in a society to more easily seize and manipulate it politically and loot it economically, it inevitably tells lies about the past.

Because once a government convinces its people that what they saw with their own eyes never really happened, what’s left of democracy in that republic is already on life support.

That’s what makes the Trump administration’s new official White House website about January 6th so chilling. This isn’t spin or selective memory: it’s an industrial-scale, government-run attempt to erase the memory of a violent insurrection and replace it with a fantasy narrative where Donald Trump and the attackers were the heroes, the police and Mike Pence were the villains, and Joe Biden simply winning the election was the real crime.

The site claims that January 6 was marked by “minimal violence”; that the rioters who smashed doors and windows, smeared feces on the walls, urinated on carpets and papers on Democratic members’ desks, contributed to the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others were “peaceful”; and that the police officers trying to prevent the mob from greater violence weren’t brutally assaulted but instead “allowed” the “protesters” into the Capitol.

The White House claims the police “aggressively” fired “tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters, injuring many and deliberately escalating tensions. Video evidence shows officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building — actions that facilitated entry — while simultaneously deploying violent force against others. These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”

One section even argues that the real injustice wasn’t the beating of officers with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and fists, but that Trump’s violent supporters were later prosecuted at all.

Another section claims that the January 6th defendants were victims of “political persecution,” while the police officers who defended the Capitol were the aggressors.

These are simple, blatant lies, something we’ve grown to expect from Trump and his people but are shocking, nonetheless.

More than 140 police officers were injured so severely that day that they were hospitalized. We watched officers crushed in doors, dragged down stairs, tased into heart attacks, beaten, eyes gouged out, and left bleeding on the ground. We heard their screams live on television.

Multiple courts reviewed thousands of hours of video and multiple juries sent hundreds of Trump’s thugs to prison. Multiple judges — many appointed by Republicans — called January 6th an “attempted coup” and an attack on America’s constitutional order.

And now our government itself — today in the hands of a billionaire wannabe dictator and his lickspittles because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let billionaires buy an election — is trying to tell Americans none of it was real.

History would like to have a word with us about this despicable attempt at revisionist propaganda.

In Nazi Germany, the regime’s most important lies weren’t about economics or foreign policy; they were about violence. Nazi street thugs were recast as patriots while the victims of their violence, including socialists, gays, immigrants, and Jews, were reframed as the provocateurs.

When the Nazi state lied about who committed violence and why, it taught its citizens that paramilitary force is legitimate when used by the “right” people.

In the Soviet Union, people didn’t necessarily believe the government’s lies, but that didn’t prevent the USSR’s dictatorship from holding power. Instead, it produced something worse: mass cynicism.

A common joke in Russia about the two major newspapers — Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”) — was “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestia there is no truth.” (В ‘Правде’ нет известий, а в ‘Известиях’ нет правды.) When citizens assume the government is lying all the time, truth stops mattering, participation becomes mere theater or social climbing, and power becomes untouchable and, thus, increasingly brutal.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the goal of constant lying during the Nazi era wasn’t persuasion about the rightness of Hitler’s pronouncements, laws, and flunkies but widespread public disorientation.

When people can no longer tell fact from fiction, she pointed out, they stop resisting and retreat into a sort of semi-tribal existence. Loyalty to “your” particular tribe replaces the rule of law.

And that’s exactly what this lie-filled January 6th website is doing.

By declaring that Trump’s mob was innocent and the American criminal justice system is corrupt, it sends a clear message: violence in service of Trump will be forgiven, even celebrated, going forward into the future.

This is an old tactic that dictators have used since the days of Ancient Rome. Putin today has motorcycle gangs called the Night Wolves, for example, who terrorize “liberals” and gays in Russia with impunity. It’s not hard to imagine the militia members in America who’re now being recruited by ICE being turned loose on the rest of us in a similar way once the “immigration emergency” is “resolved.”

The police who defend democracy, these White House lies tell would-be vigilantes, will be abandoned by the very government that employs them, while the courts that are the historic arbiters of the law will be smeared and ignored. Elections that should reflect the will of the people will instead be treated as optional suggestions rather than binding decisions.

We’ve seen this movie before in America, too. After the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” mythology rewrote an armed rebellion to preserve slavery into a noble struggle for “heritage.” That lie didn’t heal the country, but instead justified the rise of the Klan and a century of racial terror, voter suppression, and political violence that endures to this day.

These official lies about January 6th are laying the groundwork for the same kind of future for those of us who may oppose the Trump regime and its successors.

This isn’t just about salving Donald Trump’s fragile, 10-year-old ego. It’s also a setup to condition the public to accept the next time Republicans lose an election and respond with violent attacks.

The message isn’t subtle: if January 6th was “peaceful,” then January 6th is within the new norm and can — or even should — happen again. If police were the villains, then police can be ignored next time. If courts are corrupt, then their verdicts don’t count when they’re inconvenient to these new American fascists.

A democratic republic can survive policy mistakes and bad presidents; G-d knows we’ve had our share of both. What it can’t survive, though, is a government that looks straight into the camera and tells its people that violence didn’t happen when everyone watched it live.

In other words, this depraved new website isn’t just a lie: it’s an invitation.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.