Thank God the New York Times finally sent out an expedition to find out what the January 6th Trump cult is thinking:
There were moments when Paul Davis questioned his decision to join the crowd that marched on the United States Capitol last January. When he was publicly identified and fired from his job as a lawyer. When his fiancée walked out.
But then something shifted. Instead of lingering as an indelible stain, Jan. 6 became a galvanizing new beginning for Mr. Davis. He started his own law practice as a “lawyer for patriots” representing anti-vaccine workers. He began attending local conservative meetings around his hometown, Frisco, Texas. As the national horror over the Capitol attack calcified into another fault line of bitter division, Mr. Davis said his status as a Jan. 6 attendee had become “a badge of honor” with fellow conservatives.
“It definitely activated me more,” said Mr. Davis, who posted a video of himself in front of a line of police officers outside the Capitol but said he did not enter the building and was expressing his constitutional rights to protest. He has not been charged with any crime from that day. “It gave me street cred.”
The post-mortems and prosecutions that followed that infamous day have focused largely on the violent core of the mob. But a larger group has received far less attention: the thousands who traveled to Washington at the behest of Mr. Trump to protest the results of a democratic election, the vast majority of whom did not set foot in the Capitol and have not been charged with any crime — who simply went home.
For these Donald Trump supporters, the next chapter of Jan. 6 is not the ashes of a disgraced insurrection, but an amorphous new movement fueled by grievances against vaccines and President Biden, and a deepened devotion to his predecessor’s lies about a stolen election.
In the year since the attack, many have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day. They have organized efforts to raise money for the people charged in the Capitol attack, casting them as political prisoners. Some are speaking at conservative rallies. Others are running for office.
Interviews with a dozen people who were in the large mass of marchers show that the worst attack on American democracy in generations has mutated into an emblem of resistance. Those interviewed are just a fraction of the thousands who attended the rally, but their reflections present a troubling omen should the country face another close presidential election.
Many Jan. 6 attendees have shifted their focus to what they see as a new, urgent threat: Covid-19 vaccine mandates and what they call efforts by Democratic politicians to control their bodies. They cite Mr. Biden’s vaccine mandates as justification for their efforts to block his presidency.
Some bridled at Trump’s recent, full-throated endorsements of the vaccine and wondered whether he was still on their side.
“A lot of people in the MAGA Patriot community are like, ‘What is up with Trump?’” Mr. Davis, the Texas lawyer, said. “With most of us, the vaccines are anathema.”
In interviews, some who attended the Capitol protests gave credence to a new set of falsehoods promoted by Mr. Trump and conservative media figures and politicians that minimize the attack, or blame the violence falsely on left-wing infiltrators. And a few believe the insurrection did not go far enough.
“Most everybody thinks we ought to have went with guns, and I kind of agree with that myself,” said Oren Orr, 32, a landscaper from Robbinsville, N.C., who had rented a car with his wife to get to the Capitol last year. “I think we ought to have went armed, and took it back. That is what I believe.”
Mr. Orr added that he was not planning to do anything, only pray. Last year, he said he brought a baton and Taser to Washington but did not get them out.
More than a year later, the day may not define their lives, but the sentiment that drove them there has given them new purpose. Despite multiple reviews showing the 2020 elections were run fairly, they are adamant that the voting process is rigged. They feel the news media and Democrats are trying to divide the country.
The ralliers were largely white, conservative men and women who have formed the bedrock of the Trump movement since 2016. Some describe themselves as self-styled patriots, some openly carrying rifles and handguns. Many invoke the name of Jesus and say they believe they are fighting a holy war to preserve a Christian nation.
Soooo … they’re nuts. And they’re dangerous.
A national survey led by Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago, concluded that about 47 million American adults, or one in every five, agreed with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Of those, about 21 million, or 9 percent of American adults, shared the belief that animated many of those who went beyond marching and invaded the Capitol, Mr. Pape said: that the use of force was justified to restore Mr. Trump to the presidency.
“They are combustible material, like an amount of dry brushwood that could be set off during wildfire season by a lightning strike or by a spark,” he said.
They do not believe they can lose elections because they believe they are a majority and that Democrats can’t possibly be victorious because they don’t constantly hold Nuremberg style rallies with ecstatic cult members every other weekend.
I honestly don’t know what will happen if they lose again but I think it’s pretty obvious it won’t be pretty. Maybe Trump will peacefully cast off his mortal coil in his sleep before 2024 and everyone will reset, but I don’t even think that would do it. The GOP is all in on this notion now and they aren’t going to let it go. Their people obviously love it.