The White House is Now in the Business of Rewriting January 6 History

On the fifth anniversary of January 6, the Trump administration published an official government webpage that inverts reality.

A year ago, I republished a piece I had originally written in January 2022 arguing that even without the physical assault on the Capitol, January 6, 2021 was still a coup attempt. The paperwork coup, as David A. Graham called it in The Atlantic, involved fake electors, pressure on Mike Pence, and 147 Republican members of Congress voting to reject certification of an election they knew Biden had won. The riot was the visible part. The rest was happening in conference rooms and on conference calls.

I ended that piece with a worry: that within a few years, mentions of the coup attempt would become a laugh line, the same way “Russiagate” had been turned into shorthand for liberal hysteria despite the documented reality of Russian interference in 2016. What I didn’t anticipate was that the rewriting would come from the White House itself.

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The official version

On January 6, 2026, the Trump administration published a webpage at whitehouse.gov/j6 titled “January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy.” The title borrows Franklin Roosevelt’s language about Pearl Harbor, which tells you something about the irony deficit we’re working with here.

The page opens with sprawling images of Nancy Pelosi and members of the January 6 Select Committee. It describes the roughly 1,600 people charged with federal crimes that day as “patriotic Americans” who were “unfairly targeted, overcharged, and used as political examples.” It refers to those convicted of seditious conspiracy, a charge requiring proof of a plot to overthrow the government, as “mere trespassers or peaceful protesters.”

And then there’s this sentence, which I had to read several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating: “In truth, it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.”

The constitutional process of certifying an election, the thing that happens after every presidential race, the thing Mike Pence carried out despite enormous pressure not to, is now being described on an official government website as “the real insurrection.”

Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen called the page “Orwellian gaslighting.” That’s the right word for it. This is the memory hole in action, except instead of disappearing inconvenient facts, they’re publishing them on a .gov domain and daring you to believe your own eyes.

What the page leaves out

The White House page claims that “no law enforcement officers lost their lives” on January 6. This is a lie by omission so brazen it borders on performance art.