The Republican Code of Silence

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As the fight for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination slowly takes shape, January 6 is the elephant in the elephant’s room. The party of militant right-wing grievance would just as soon the American electorate put that whole plotting-a-coup-to-install-an-authoritarian-dictator thing firmly in the national memory hole. That’s why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis omitted all mention of the unfortunate episode in his recently published campaign memoir—and why, per a recent Politico dispatch, the assembled movement worthies at the Conservative Political Action Conference only spoke of the failed Trump coup as still another occasion to elevate their own pet narratives of political victimization. The real culprits, you see, were the Deep State agents forever conspiring to keep their virtuous Great Leader away from the machinery of federal power.

As my Nation colleague Joan Walsh has written, the GOP’s great wall of silence concerning the insurrection is yet one more study in political cowardice among the would-be leaders of the American right. Yet it’s also a brand of cowardice born of political calculation, with Trump already the presumptive front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination—and a primary field and donor-led establishment still largely at a loss to confront the core dogmas of Trumpism without also drawing away a significant segment of the GOP’s base.

“If they were going after Trump on everything but January 6, that’s a very valid point,” says former Republican National Committee communications director Douglas Heye. “But they’re not. People in the media will say, Gosh, these guys won’t talk about Trump at all and they don’t mention January 6 at all. Well, if you’re not talking about the one, you’re definitely not talking about the other.” The GOP field’s collective defensive crouch is thus “smart and strategic,” in Heye’s judgment: “If they denounce Trump and January 6, well, they’ll get the golf clap from the New York Times editorial page, and Trump will eviscerate them.”

The notorious CPAC gathering, which has long been a forum for the most extreme and bellicose factions of the American right, was also not a venue for sober reconsiderations of Trump and January 6. Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN representative, drew boos from the Trump-loving audience when she ventured even mild criticisms of the GOP’s recent electoral fortunes. “The vibe was anti-anti-January 6,” says Tim Miller, the communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential bid, who was in attendance at CPAC. “The closest thing you got to a comment about how maybe the party should reconsider the trajectory they’re on was Hayley talking about how they lost seven of the last eight elections, and they were all like, No, we didn’t.”

Indeed, January 6 plotters enjoyed prime billing at the confab—together, of course, with the master plotter Trump himself.

“Ralph Norman [R-S.C.] spoke, and talked about how [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] Mark Milley was a traitor—when it was Norman who had asked Trump to declare martial law to keep himself in office.”

Miller adds. “The problem is you can’t really be too pro- or anti-January 6. If you’re too far out on the limb with pro-January 6 talk, you’re in [Douglas] Mastriano territory”—the insurrectionist zealot on the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial ballot in 2002 who lost badly to Josh Shapiro. “And if you’re too far anti-January 6, you’re out there with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger”—two Republican members of the select House committee investigating the attempted coup whose participation cost them their political careers.

I don't care about January 6 because we would have had the same riots if Trump had won in 2020. Except it wouldn't just have been at the capital, it would have been every major city in America.

The only reason to care about January 6 is if it fits a narrative that can be weaponized towards a political strategic advantage. We're not running from January 6. We never thought it was a big deal in the first place. The Left has made it a big deal ever since it happened.

The MAGA's can only keep on using January 6 as a nothing-burger cudgel because it failed. It probably would be harder had they gotten to the certification ballots, Pence, Pelosi etc.

The Confederates accepted that Lincoln won the 1860 election, their problem was with the expected consequences. If the Confederates wanted to they could have sacked the Capital and a lot else in Washington. D.C., it is right on the border of Virginia but unlike the Jan 6 insurrectionists, the Confederate insurrectionists did not do it.

There probably would have been all sorts of riots had Trump won. How does that make January 6 less odious?

Yeah but what about the rest of us conservatives? We're not all MAGA on the Right. And most of us think its a nothing-burger.

I'd vote for Trump again if he's the Republican nominee, but he's not my first choice, and as things stand, I don't really have a choice. That is why I want Ron Desantis or another strong conservative to run.

Fair enough I changed the language.

Plenty of conservates do not think Jan 6 was a nothing burger. I would guess that prior to the Trump phenomenon, 95+ percent of Conservatives would have been horrified if something like that happened. Why? Because they believed in "conserving" institutions such as the courts which denied Trump's challenges over and over again and rituals like the certification of the elections.

Of course, you have a choice if Trump is nominated. There are always third-party candidates and the write-in option.