Instant rewrites of history are an American specialty, as anyone familiar with the career arc of Oliver North or the buildup to the second US invasion of Iraq can readily affirm. Still, on the fourth anniversary of the deadly and delusional uprising at the US Capitol, we’re poised for an unprecedented chapter in the annals of our self-induced amnesia: A concerted bid to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election will not simply be memory-holed in a second Trump administration; it will be a transformed into a noble civic undertaking.

This was always going to be a key ideological aim of a Trump-led GOP restored to triumphant power: The forces of January 6 revisionism already guided MAGA election strategy during the 2022 midterms, when the party put election-denying candidates before a majority of the electorate. And after Trump announced his candidacy for reelection in 2023, his first rally, in Waco, Texas, featured a modified version of the national anthem called “And Justice for All,” sung by convicted participants in the coup attempt performing as “The J6 Choir.” (The song also featured Trump himself reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, showing that he possesses no practical understanding of the phrase “the republic for which it stands” or the pledge’s socialist provenance.)

During his reelection campaign, Trump referred to the insurrection as a “day of love”—surely news to the seven people who died and the 150 others injured in connection with the attack, to say nothing of the hundreds of lawmakers evacuated under the threat of violence. He has also pledged to pardon the thousand-plus rioters convicted on charges stemming from the coup attempt, calling them “patriots,” “hostages,” and “political prisoners.” That prospect stands out in stark relief against the Trump White House’s plans to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants at the outset of the new administration: Violent and unconstitutional MAGA impunity is to be rewarded and glorified, while a vast population of foreign-born workers will be stigmatized and stripped of their livelihoods, homes, and family ties.

What’s more, the Trump administration will target the public figures who sought to create some measure of accountability for the coup attempt. Trump has called for the jailing of members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, has endorsed the “fedsurrection” conspiracy theory, which baselessly contends that FBI agents stoked the failed coup in an effort to discredit the MAGA movement. (Patel also helped produce the recording of the J6 Choir’s single release of “And Justice for All.”) A Patel-led FBI would likely be an eager helpmeet of Trump’s rolling campaign of political retribution, particularly since Patel also wants to sever the intelligence arm of the bureau from its law-enforcement functions—a ploy that would greatly increase the White House’s influence over the bureau’s operations.

To draw attention to the overlapping threats of January 6 erasure and an executive branch seeking to prioritize political vengeance, State Democracy Defenders Action, a bipartisan nonprofit group focused on issues of election sabotage and autocracy, held a press event ahead of the January 6 anniversary and the convening of the 119th Congress. Tom Joscelyn, a Republican counterterrorism specialist who was a principal author of the January 6 Committee’s final report, cited Trump’s final weeks in office during his first term—the period during which he promulgated false claims of election fraud and invited supporters to converge on the centers of power in Washington—as a reminder that he will resume the powers of the presidency as a strongman figure courting unquestioning devotion. “Trump has already demonstrated that he will behave as an autocrat and that he will abuse the powers of the executive branch,” Joscelyn said. “Not only does Trump demand servility and fealty, but he also demands this whitewashing of January 6 and scapegoating and blaming others for it.”

Maryland Democratic Representative Jamin Raskin, who sat on the January 6 select committee, stressed that Trump’s pledge of a blanket pardon for January 6 defendants would kick off his second term with a de facto constitutional crisis. “It would be an extraordinary event in the history of the republic to have a president pardon more than a thousand criminal convicts who were in jail for their part in an event incited by that president,” Raskin said. He added that any subsequent actions by pardoned January 6 defendants, “whether in a political context or in another context, will soon be laid at the doorstep of soon-to-be-president Donald Trump.” Raskin went on to note that the sweeping nature of Trump’s pardon pledge threatens, in the absence of close public scrutiny, to severely dilute any clear sense of legal accountability. Among the rioters, he said, “there were people who disobeyed lawful orders, and then there were people who engaged in lethal violence against police officers. The media should not allow President Trump to get away with saying ‘I’m going to pardon all these people,’ as though there were some procedural flaw in all these cases. This is perhaps the most well-documented crime in American history.”

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Of course, the mainstream press has already begun normalizing the incoming Trump White House, even as the incoming president steps up his own bogus war of retribution against the media. It’s difficult to see how a billionaire-managed and revenue-starved media complex will hold the line on January 6 accountability for Trump, especially when the legal cases seeking to establish that accountability have largely stalled out in the wake of his reelection, and while cabinet nominees like Patel peddle self-serving lies about the insurrection. (In a far from unrelated development, 11 corporations and trade associations that had denounced the attack on the capital are now contributing seven-figure donations to Trump’s lavish inauguration.)

In his final days in office, President Joe Biden has included January 6 committee members Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney among the 20 final recipients of the Presidential Citizens Medal in his administration—a typically lackluster Democratic effort to head off Trump’s threatened legal pursuit of the committee with a dose of ex officio prestige. But after Trump’s inauguration later this month, the fanciful counternarrative of January 6 that has long gripped the GOP will become a bulwark of both federal law enforcement and MAGA policymaking. It’s true that the crisis precipitated by Trump’s baroque and venal brand of election denialism will pose a stress test of constitutional governance in his second term—but it’s also true that it’s come about largely because our legal and political institutions have failed the critical stress tests preceding it. For the MAGA faithful, in short, the most salient lesson of January 6 is that it worked.