Republicans are laying a path back to power, paving it with lies

When the insurrectionists of 6 January rampaged through the Capitol, congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia helped barricade a door, and he fled when the rest of Congress did. A photograph shows him looking panicky, mouth wide open and arm gesticulating wildly, behind what appears to be a security team member with a gun drawn, defending him. But a few months later he declared: “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from 6 January, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”

Clyde’s account of 6 January might be a little more preposterous than those of his fellow Republican legislators. But they all joined him in pretending nothing much had happened and objecting to the investigation of the day’s events. After all, they were partly responsible, most of them. It was elected Republicans who supported and spread the earlier lies that Donald Trump had won the election, the lies that fed the insurrection; and then they lied some more about their own words and actions before, during and after. In the immediate aftermath, the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was angry and shaken, declaring: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president.” Then he too began the project of walking it all back.

What has ensued is a cover-up in plain sight. When Trump took office in 2016, Republicans faced a crisis: their party had won, but only by ushering to a minority victory one of history’s most extravagantly dishonest men. They had to stand with him or against him, and most chose to stand with him. Others chose to fade away by resigning or going home when their terms were up. Almost none of them stood up against him. The famously vindictive Trump punished any signs of disloyalty, so they were loyal. And to be loyal meant joining him in corruption and lies. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it,” Lindsey Graham tweeted in the spring of 2016, before becoming one of Trump’s most grovelling sycophants.

In a way, the sycophants got stronger: if truth restrains us and links us together, they unchained themselves. We make contracts with each other with words; we share information, make agreements and commitments, hold each other accountable and show who we are. Lies are broken contracts, in which words misrepresent what the speaker knows; they aim to delude, exploit and divide. The liar may get stronger, but the social fabric gets weaker. That strength is precarious, so lies have be piled atop lies to keep accountability at a distance.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are notoriously shifty, and the Republican party had no great reputation for honesty previously. Many of their campaigns long before Trump could politely be called misleading. But after 2016, they clustered around the gaslighter-in-chief like bugs around a streetlight. I often think of what Trump did as disinhibition: the pallid, bashful untruths of yore were replaced by baldfaced outrages. They lost any compunction about openly contradicting themselves, and did so often, never more than with the insurrection of 6 January.

As the mob was smashing its way into the building, congressman Jim Jordan had been on the house floor accusing election officials in six states of corruption. A week later he declared: “I’ve never said that this election was stolen.” But, as CNN noted: “Jordan claimed in October that Democrats were working to steal the election and spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Pennsylvania two days after the election. In December, he said he didn’t know how he could be convinced that ‘Trump didn’t actually win’ the election.”

During the hours when the mob rampaged through the US Capitol building, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called up Trump, reportedly furious. “The president bears responsibility for the attack,” he said shortly thereafter. Then he devoted himself to winning back Trump’s favour and playing down what had happened. “Pressed on whether he regretted working to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory, Mr McCarthy took the position that he did no such thing,” the New York Times reported in April.

Then he worked hard to sabotage the investigation into what had happened, by trying to put two congressmen most loyal to the big lie, Jim Banks and the ever-disruptive champion shouter Jim Jordan, on the committee. The house majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, blocked their appointment. Banks was later caught sending out letters, seeking information from government agencies, claiming he was the ranking Republican on the 6 January committee, of which he was never in fact a member.

By September, McCarthy was full team cover-up: the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell noted that McCarthy “threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests” of the congressional committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. That’s not technically lying, but it’s certainly an attempt to prevent the truth from being known. There’s a lot to cover up, especially if you don’t want the committee to find out the extent to which Congress itself was involved in the attack on Congress.

The politicians who fled in fear thereafter threw themselves into denying the threat and protecting its chief instigator. No one did so more slavishly than the then vice-president, Mike Pence, who was pressured before and during 6 January to violate the law and exercise a power he did not possess to change the election outcome. “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency,” Trump had tweeted early that day; and then, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”. At Trump’s instigation, the mob was chanting: “Hang Mike Pence!”

Pence trivialised the event when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network: “I’m not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration.” Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonnell, who was seriously injured defending the politicians, told NPR: “That one day in January almost cost my life. And we did everything possible to prevent him [Pence] from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now he’s telling us that that one day in January doesn’t mean anything. It’s pathetic. It’s a disgrace.”

One of the first lies to explode out of the insurrection was that somehow the attack on the Capitol was the work of Antifa. The very idea of Antifa, as they used it, was an older lie, a transformation of scattered individuals and impromptu groups of antifascists into a cohesive sinister gang that could be blamed for pretty much anything, anywhere. The New York Times described how on 6 January the right was claiming that the insurrection had been led by Antifa, not Trump supporters.

By the end of the day, Fox was promoting it, the claim was all over Twitter, and: “Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters ‘were members of the violent terrorist group antifa’.” The claim, the Times added, “has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party”

That is, they took the position that the riot, which at the time Republican legislators begged the president to stop, was instead a riot by an essentially imaginary leftwing organisation with no conceivable motive to prevent the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Now the investigation is closing in on the role that many in Congress played in the attack on Congress. Having fled their own mobs, they are now trying to flee the truth, and relying on the fact that a significant portion of the country prefers the lies.

The Republicans who helped the failed coup along and then dismissed its import are preparing to do it better next time. The Democratic senator Brian Schatz tweeted on Tuesday: “They are organizing the next one, not as a secret conspiracy, but as a central organizing principle for the next election.” The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “Donald Trump has infected, and that’s the appropriate word, the Republican party with his big lie and with his desire to stop democracy. We have no choice but to move forward,” by which he meant overturn the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. 6 January was one confrontation; there’s another one coming. The lies may implode at some point, but the liars have to be defeated.

*Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses