Trump's Predictable January 6th Rebranding

OK, first…take 6 minutes and watch this:

Crazy, right?

We made it back in 2022 on the first anniversary of the January 6 attack. We never aired it because it felt far on the nose. We designed it to look like a Tucker-esque newscaster in the year 2025 after Trump had retaken the office of the presidency and how the rhetoric would be deployed in the future. The actor is Matt Walton, who is tremendously talented and really killed it with this performance.

We never aired it, which is rare. Oddly, there are very few spots we never released. It just wasn’t time for this one.

Now that Donald Trump is making the January 6th attack a central campaign theme, we thought we’d bring it out of the vault because it highlights the terrible gift of foresight.

Since 2015, some weird part of my brain has been able to predict Donald Trump’s actions and the effect he’ll have on our politics, our culture, and our nation. I’m always right, and almost no one believes me. I’m the Cassandra of all things Trump, over and over telling friends in politics and the media, “Oh, no…it’s much worse than that.”

I’m Rickstradamus, and I hate it.

I’ve been right about the downside risks of Trump more times than I care to relate, mainly because being right has never made it easier to watch the damage Trump and his enablers have caused us.

In Trump's era, there are two primary kinds of analytical perspectives.

The first, the “Normie Normalcy” viewpoint, is prevalent in the Republican party at scale. You’ve seen it before: “Take him seriously, but not literally.” “It’s just Trump being Trump.” “He’ll have people around him who won’t let him do anything too crazy.” “He’s just responding to the base.” “It’s just for show.” “Don’t worry, [Respectable Republican leader] will keep him under control.” “There are laws, guidelines, institutions, and norms that even Trump won’t bypass.” “Hey, we’ve got to win…we can’t without him…” “He’s better than Biden.”

The second and vastly more pernicious perspective is that Trump represents something good, that the corrupt ideal of Western liberal representative government has had its run, and that Trumpian nationalism (Christian, mostly, but also jack-boots-and-camps nationalism) and statist populism with a charismatic Strong Man at the helm is a necessary cure for a decadent America. This second is amplified by a MAGA media enterprise from Fox on down.

I told you from the beginning, in the dark days of 2015, that the first take was a comfortable lie. The institutional and legal framework that should protect America from an autocratic and unstable man like Donald Trump was always more fragile than we hoped. We were always more liable to the Black Swan failure modes because the deep normalcy bias about how power and politics work in America was wrong. Some people want to burn it all down, and they support Trump with a ferocious passion.

Nearly everyone got it wrong about Trump’s nature from the start. Now, they’re stacking the errors higher, concatenating the fault model by saying, “Oh, everyone already knows X about Trump…and Biden is so old,” with X being whatever the latest madness, cruelty, criminality, excess, or political arson he commits and "so old" being the latest attempt at both-siding the fate of our republic.

Knowing what would come and exactly how Trump and the enterprise of the Maga media system will always engage and behave gives us the power to predict, almost word for word, what they’ll do and also, disappointingly, what all the so-called guardians and guard rails of our system won’t do in response.

It’s understandable why so many people in the media have just greeted every new excess with a shrug. It’s hard. It sucks. It’s painful to know. You can’t change the velocity vector of the nightmare. You can’t shut off the madness. The throttle is stuck forward and welded down.

After January 6, we knew it was coming. We knew Trump would reframe the actions of a group of shameless, violent terrorists attacking the US Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election into martyrs and cast the most unpatriotic act of the last 150 years into a heroic effort to save democracy.

One of the most challenging things about our work is the constant recognition that as horrible as you think something is today, it must and will get darker.

Back to the video above.

What we thought in the spring of 2022 was an overly broad but beautifully delivered dark and satirical monologue is the kind of thing you can see on any conservative news channel today.

It’s the rhetoric coming in every Trump speech, as the mob that attacked our sacred elections is reframed as a cadre of heroic patriots. Trump called the men and women who attacked the Capitol “…the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages” and then said, “They were unbelievable patriots.”

They weren’t patriots, but their actions, and his, are all too believable.

Sadly, it is all too predictable.

Our archetype, Spencer Aaron, looks pensive after his fiery monologue just as he cuts to the show's sponsors, as though he's perhaps concerned that he went too far. This was, it turns out, the only thing we seem to have gotten wrong in this foretelling. Because the voices of MAGA have no shame or doubt in their actions. The last eight years have been nothing if not a lesson in overestimating the character of half of our electorate. Their resolve is strong. Ours must be stronger."

We have seen the future, and it should scare the hell out of you.