"We've Entered An Epoch Of Anti-History"

The following is part of an editorial by Frank Bruni in The New York Times:

Anyone who treats or talks about history as a fixed narrative knows nothing about history at all. History yields to fresh insights and new research. It’s hijacked by agendas. After being written by the victors, it sometimes allows the losers a few edits. It’s reinvestigated, relitigated, recast.

But the makeover of Jan. 6, 2021, just four short years later stands disturbingly apart from that. It adds a chilling contemporary twist:

What happens when a demagogue with grandiose ambitions, few if any scruples and little regard for honesty has, at his disposal, an utterly corrupted information environment like ours? When he enjoys a playing field so ideally suited for lies?

A day of violence becomes “a day of love.” Rioters who injured scores of police officers and spilled blood on the Capitol steps become “hostages” jailed for their valor. And nearly 1,600 pardons and commutations are issued by that demagogue, who is confident that he can get away with it — that he can even be celebrated for it — because he has minted and steadfastly marketed a version of events that serves his purposes.

President Trump’s Day 1 legal reprieves for members of the violent mob that ransacked the Capitol and tore through its marble hallways on the hunt for lawmakers are first and foremost an affront to common decency and a betrayal of bedrock democratic principles. But they also present a cautionary example of how quickly and how far we now travel — or can be tugged — from truth. Of how assiduously and successfully someone can degrade it. . . .

Trump’s transformation of Jan. 6 falls in line with countless instances of his telling Americans that they’re misperceiving something that they aren’t, being tricked when he’s the trickster, swallowing whole a gumbo of bunk that his enemies or the so-called establishment has cooked up.

It shows once again that he’s not merely a serial liar but a strategic one. He understands the power of going big — of making extreme claims, insisting on the opposite of the actual, swearing by it emphatically and sticking to it constantly despite all evidence and any claims to the contrary. Many listeners inevitably assume that he must have some truth on his side if he’s projecting so much conviction, such a potent sense of grievance. Otherwise, surely, he’d hedge and waver. . . .

We’ve gone beyond any usual rewrite of history when the Capitol marauders become martyrs, deserving of rescue on the first day of Trump’s presidency. When the response to an attempted coup becomes “meh.” We’ve entered an epoch of anti-history. The man inaugurated on Monday is its author.