President Donald Trump’s January 6 pardons mark the culmination of the MAGA media’s yearslong campaign to remove the stain from his supporters’ violent assault on the U.S. Capitol — and for their own culpability in that attempted coup.

On the first day of his second term, Trump is apparently giving clemency to every participant in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Speaking to reporters while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, he said he would be signing full pardons for “approximately 1,500 people” while providing six commutations. He appears to be wiping the slate clean for all of what he has ludicrously termed the “J6 hostages,” including hundreds convicted of violent assaults on law enforcement. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack and sentenced to 22 years in prison, is getting out tonight.

The world watched four years ago as thousands of Trumpists broke through ranks of law enforcement, stormed into the Capitol, and sent into hiding the members of Congress who had assembled to certify the electoral vote. That mob — summoned to Washington, D.C., by Trump and incited by his lies and those of the right-wing media that his reelection had been stolen — was the final salvo in a multifaceted plot by Trump and his allies to keep him in office following his defeat at the ballot box.

A broad, bipartisan consensus formed in real time that Trump was responsible for a travesty. And the right-wing media and tech elite agreed, denouncingTrump and calling for consequences, while Rupert Murdoch proposed cutting him off from the support of his media empire. 

But while Fox News stars publicly described the assailants in the immediate aftermath as “criminals” who should be “arrested and prosecuted” and do “jail time,” they also validated the mob’s concerns — and only in private did they point the finger at the president himself. 

That initial reticence was a signal that the January 6 consensus was fragile — and indeed, as nearly 1,600 participants faced charges over the months and years that followed, Trump’s allies at Fox and elsewhere in the right-wing press went to work dismantling the idea that they had done anything wrong. 

A coterie of Trumpists led by Tucker Carlson sought to downplay the extent of the day’s horrors and substitute a revisionist counternarrative that melded decontextualized video from the day with naked conspiracy-mongering to declare the insurrectionists the victims of a false-flag operation perpetuated by the federal government. 

That twisted take drew initial resistance from more responsible members of the right-wing media, but over time, it became dominant on the right. Evidence of the day’s depravities and Trump’s culpability for them were hidden from right-wing audiences, Republicans who sought to expose them were purged, and efforts to hold Trump legally accountable met with bitter denunciations. 

The right’s pro-insurrection turn was most beneficial to Trump, helping him rise to the GOP presidential nomination and back to the presidency four years after his coup attempt. But as he described the mob’s participants as “hostages” and floated pardons for their deeds, right-wing personalities who had once denounced the insurrectionists began describing them as the victims of politicized prosecutions and calling for clemency. 

And now they’ve gotten their way, rewarding those who tried to tear down American democracy — and making it more likely that such a horror will again be visited upon us some day soon. And the same propaganda machine that was able to turn a nightmare that unfolded in front of all of our eyes into a story of Trumpist victims is gearing up for four more years of lies on Trump’s behalf.