Forgetting January 6th
By 
Jonathan Alter sums up what happened afterwards, which was not nearly enough:
Jan. 6 is at the center of what historians will probably view as a tragic set of missed opportunities. The House Jan. 6 committee did a terrific job of illuminating what happened and how Mr. Trump could be called to account. But Merrick Garland’s Justice Department dawdled too long in 2021 and 2022 and the derelict Supreme Court ran out the clock.
Mr. Trump now claims that “nothing” wrong was done that day, except by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. “Nothing” is a good word to associate with him about Jan. 6. That’s what he did for 187 minutes while the Constitution he took an oath to defend came under attack. He was too busy watching TV.
Mr. Trump’s choice for F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has raised money for families of the Jan. 6 prisoners and peddled outlandish conspiracy theories claiming that undercover F.B.I. agents instigated the riot to discredit the MAGA movement. Mr. Patel, under questioning from Democrats at his confirmation hearings, will have to decide whether Jan. 6 was a wonderful “free speech movement,” as he called it, or an F.B.I.-inspired riot. He can’t have it both ways. If the latter, will he support pardoning the dastardly F.B.I. agents he has promised to fire?
But of course Patel and the rest of Trump’s collaborators inside and outside of government can have it both ways, because intellectual consistency or even minimal rationality are standards that don’t apply to either fascist ideology or fascist behavior.
Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government, and his sedition has been rewarded with another term as president. That sentence represents a total failure of American law, politics, and culture, and the sheer enormity of that failure is something that our systems and institutions have not even begun to come to terms with, except to the extent that they are shoving that failure down the memory hole every day. And every time a Democratic politician says anything about how important it is to meet Trump halfway, every time one participates at a “prayer meeting” with Trump’s lieutenants, etc., that act of erasing the memory and meaning of January 6th is performed again.