The facts, how indisputable they seemed. On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the heart of American democracy with brute force. Encouraged by the defeated president. But three years have passed. And what the whole world saw with its own eyes, millions of Americans started to say didn’t happen at all. At least not with a lot of violence, not to sabotage democracy.
Against all knowledge? Or have they really come to believe it? Only 18 percent of Republicans think so a recent poll that the storming was “largely violent” – compared to 26 percent two years ago. Only 31 percent of Republicans still believe that Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 39 percent two years ago. How the truth was covered up is no secret. Trump himself has worked hard on it and fellow party members in Congress want to forget the issue as quickly as possible. Even politicians who had to run for their lives during the storm are now supporting Trump in his election campaign.
What do those members of Congress say at home, talking to their spouse or their children, who are not crazy either, who also saw the windows of the Capitol being smashed and officers being hit with flagpoles? Family members who also heard calls for Vice President Pence to be hanged? What do those politicians say to themselves? “I have to”? Or: “I’ve come to realize that Biden really stole the election, the storming of the Capitol wasn’t that bad – and what’s more, the FBI was behind it”?
“People believe what they want to believe,” says a high judge in the oppressive novel Metropol by the German writer Eugen Ruge. The book is largely set in the Soviet Union, during Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s. Judge Wassili Wassiljewitsch Ulrich (who really existed) presides over the show trials in which alleged opponents of the regime are put on trial. They confess things they never did. They go along with the regime’s paranoid conspiracy theories. The judge sentences one after another to death, without any real evidence, with no regard for the truth. He is a cynic, he tells himself that he does not believe in anything. He has no illusions about the beliefs of others.
“No, people’s faith does not depend on facts, not on evidence,” he muses. “Even worse; you can give them facts, you can refute them, it doesn’t help anything. On the contrary: if you want to believe something, you will find a way. He will twist and turn things until they fit his beliefs again. His intelligence will not be an obstacle, but will actually help him.”
Under Stalinism, people denied the truth out of fear. One wrong word could endanger their lives. During a hearing, the judge thinks: “If these defendants would now stand up and tell the truth, all sixteen of them… they would overthrow Stalin.” In the US, no one follows Trump’s lies out of fear for their lives. But if 16 prominent Republicans had the courage to tell the truth bluntly—about Trump, the 2020 election, and what happened on “January 6,” everything would be different—including them.