On January 6, 2021, the nation watched in awe as a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol building. It was a historic assault on American democracy, an attempted insurrection at the behest of an outgoing president. Since then, though, Fox News and other right-wing media have tirelessly sought to destroy the national consensus on this event, alleviating Trump of his guilt and whitewashing the day’s events.
Right-wing propagandists have successfully engineered a shift in Republican views on the events of that day by creating a revisionist counternarrative. In their reckoning, the attempted armed insurrection was merely a political protest that got out of hand, the day’s violence was orchestrated by undercover federal agents, and the perpetrators are political prisoners and martyrs.
The alternative reality of January 6 in conservative propaganda has become central to Trump’s reelection efforts. By manufacturing and repeating this lie, Trump’s media cronies have ensured his nomination for the presidency and positioned him to carry out the Republican Party’s top priorities of cutting taxes for rich people, banning abortions, building migrant deportation camps, and deploying state power against perceived political enemies.
Despite talk of a Fox-Trump breakup, the network’s business model dictates that it hew closer to Trump as he gains the Republican nomination. We can expect Fox to slide back into Trump TV over this year, amping up the revisionist history for right-wing media viewers.
Media Matters Matt Gertz provides this sobering prediction:
“After a yearslong right-wing drumbeat of stolen-election lies and insurrection revisionism, and the corresponding purges of dissident Republican leaders and terror campaigns against election workers, the battleground is more favorable to a second attempt to overturn an election through lies and violence.”
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee revealed that China paid millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s businesses while he was serving as president, describing these and similar payments as unconstitutional “foreign emoluments.”
Since at least 2018, conservatives have been trying to damage President Joe Biden’s political standing by suggesting that he has been compromised by foreign payments to his son’s businesses. These attacks coalesced into a bogus conspiracy theory that Biden had taken corrupt action in Ukraine, and Trump’s obsession with this falsehood resulted in his first impeachment.
But as we now know, the president seemingly compromised by foreign payments was Trump, who received over $5.5 million from China and millions more from other countries while he was in office. The irony is staggering.
In 2023, Fox host Sean Hannity said he couldn’t imagine how people would react “if Donald Trump and the Trump Organization of the Trump family were making tens of millions of dollars from our top geopolitical foes like China and Russia.” Trump himself told Hannity that a president receiving money from China would be “compromised.”
Naturally, Hannity called the House report “lies.”
