January 6 Romanticism Has Become Trump’s ‘Lost Cause’
Trump’s recent celebration of the failed insurrection on January 6 shows the extent to which MAGA stands for an elaborate myth in which he can never be defeated.
From a very basic point of view, there’s nothing especially mysterious about Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. It’s a classic reactionary political uprising that has both attracted and mobilized many millions of Americans disgruntled, for one reason or another, with the unsettling economic, cultural, and political developments of late 20th and early 21st centuries. Its “Make America Great Again” packaging makes it abundantly clear that the movement’s adherents believe there was a time in living memory when those unsettling trends were at least held in abeyance — whether it’s the decline of the traditional patriarchal family structure; or the grinding effect of globalization on manufacturing jobs; or the steady increase in the size and visibility of non-white elements of the population (especially immigrants); or “woke” sensitivities that make it impossible to freely express one’s racist or sexist views; or imaginary but deeply felt threats to the right to stockpile guns.
But if you look at and listen to Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy, you will notice it’s not really focused on any of these perceived maladies. It’s focused on itself, and on its leader, with a monomaniacal grievance surrounding the termination of the 45th presidency increasingly taking center stage. And as New York Times columnist Charles Blow has accurately suggested, there is a strong aroma of the neo-Confederate “Lost Cause” now emanating from the MAGA movement:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight, who has written on several occasions about Trump’s Lost Cause, told me that Trump’s iteration has all the necessary elements: a story of loss, culprits, ready-made villains and “an enormous narrative of grievance.” As Blight explained, Trump “feeds on this imagined tale of what could have been, should have been, might have been and once again can be retrieved; the glory can be retrieved.”
The sense of lost glory associated with every reactionary movement on the planet has been concentrated by Trump into a single incident: the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021, when the restoration of American Greatness was interrupted not by the thugs assaulting the U.S. Capitol, but by the politicians within it who confirmed the monstrous crime of a stolen presidential election. This is why Trump has moved from treating the insurrectionists as Antifa agents provocateurs seeking to discredit him into hailing them as heroes. He now begins his rallies saluting as a recording of the “J6 Prison Choir” singing the national anthem is played, mashed up with his own recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
A “lost cause” needs its martyrs, and the “J6 hostages” imprisoned by the Biden administration fit the bill marvelously for Trump, signifying that January 6 wasn’t the low point of his presidency but its summit, and the beginning of his and his movement’s redemption. Everything that stands in the way of his comeback — particularly Democratic “lawfare” seeking his imprisonment and financial ruin, Democratic “open borders” policies aiming at transforming the electorate, and Democratic “voter fraud” rigging the election once again — is part of an immense conspiracy focused on Trump as much as Trump is focused on himself. It’s a narcissist’s dream world.
In this fantasy, by definition the Trump administration was the high point of American history, with the greatest economy ever, with a military and a commander in chief that no one would dare cross, with a border hermetically sealed against swarthy invaders, and with all the ancient verities cherished by conservative patriots fully restored and secured. That was, until that fateful day in Washington when the bad guys won, or seemed to have won, and the patriots who tried to stop them were rounded up and locked away.
There’s obviously no reasoning or compromising with people who think this way. But aside from providing an alternative universe immune from adverse persuasion or inconvenient facts, Trump’s cult of January 6 allows anyone with a grievance against American life as it exists today to identify with his defiant resolve to overthrow it all. Like the neo-Confederates of my childhood in the Deep South for whom the emblems of that evil slave-holding enterprise represented a cherished “way of life” that was gone with the wind, MAGA folk today can hold together a host of resentments under those red hats and make Trump’s comeback their own. It’s a powerful set of emotions this peculiar man has harnessed to his cause, and it’s clear he is no more likely to accept defeat in this election than he did in November of 2020 or on January 6. His is the cause that cannot be lost, only betrayed — until it inevitably rises again.