“Once he takes office, Mr. Trump will be positioned to finish refashioning Jan. 6 as a modern Lost Cause of the Confederacy.”

Tyrants rewrite history. They do so to strengthen their claim to political power. The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump’s telling of what happened on that day is also a lie. Historical revisionism is a good thing when it is built upon actual facts. But Trump’s spin of the January 6 events is not revisionism, it is political propaganda.

Here is Dan Barry and Alan Feuer at The New York Times on the way Donald Trump has tried to reinvent what happened four years ago:

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.

This inverted interpretation defied what the country had watched unfold, but it neatly fit the persecution narrative that binds Mr. Trump to many of his faithful. Once he committed to running again for president, he doubled down on flipping the script about the riot and its blowback, including a congressional inquiry and two criminal indictments against him, as part of an orchestrated victimization.

That day was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But with his return to office, Mr. Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called “a day of love.” He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new administration, while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.

When asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Mr. Trump accepts any responsibility for what unfolded on Jan. 6, his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the “political losers” who tried to derail his career and asserted that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.” She added, “The American people did not fall for the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th.”

The Jan. 6 tale that Mr. Trump tells is its own kind of replacement theory, one that covers over the marble-hard facts the way a blue carpet will cover those tainted Capitol steps on Inauguration Day.

What happened and why seemed beyond debate.

Hundreds of thousands of tips. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. Thousands of seized cellphones. The attack on the Capitol was, after all, the largest digital crime scene in history, the total estimated cost of its aftermath exceeding $2.7 billion.

And this:

In so many ways, Jan. 6 had become part of his brand — a brand in which an attack on the symbol of American democracy became a defense of that same democracy: a blow against political thugs and closet communists, deep-state plots and an unjust justice system.

A part of the brand that, in November, helped Mr. Trump win election as the 47th president of the United States.

Once he takes office, Mr. Trump will be positioned to finish refashioning Jan. 6 as a modern Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Read the rest here.