This summer, I took my two older children to Washington D.C. to see the sights. We started off on a tour bus that took us up Capitol Hill, with the driver pointing out landmarks and cracking jokes along the route. I was feeling blandly patriotic until the west front of the Capitol Building came into view. I was struck with the memory of what I had seen on TV on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters scaled those walls, wrestled with police, and forced their way into the building in an attempt to stop the certification of the election results. A chill came over me: Oh, right. That happened here.
And then our guide actually mentioned January 6: another surprise. It seemed somehow provocative to bring it up. He calmly pointed out doors and windows that had been broken during the assault and described the intensified security that had followed. The other passengers on the bus grew quiet. I wondered if they shared my emotional response, or if they were among those Americans who believed the whole thing was overblown. The silence felt awkward. I thought, They’re probably the type who prefer not to talk about it.
And then my eleven-year-old son leaned over and asked me, “Mom, what was ‘January 6’?”
Ah. So maybe I’m the type who prefers not to talk about it.
Years ago, when Trump won the 2016 election and my oldest child was in kindergarten, I wrote about how hard it felt to talk to him about what was happening in the world. Now I have four children in grade school, all of them growing up in the distorted world of Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. I have had to decide many times how much to let them in on the truth and how much to protect them from it. I want them to have enough good information to inoculate them against the bad stuff that might come their way from peers or on social-media platforms I don’t even know about. I want them to know my values are not the values of the MAGA cult—especially when that MAGA influence creeps into the Church I’ve taught them to love. On the other hand, I want them to be able to sleep at night. So, mostly, I don’t bring it up. When I watched the January 6 riot unfold on television, I remember being glad my kids were in school; if they had been home, I would have turned it off.
On that trip to D.C., three and a half years after the chaos at the Capitol, I realized my children needed to know about what happened that day, if only to help them appreciate the stakes of the coming election. So, after our trip, I found a short video that told the story. It was measured in its tone and restrained in its imagery, showing just enough to convey a sense of the violence without, I hoped, stirring up fear. My eleven-year-old took it in and responded with a new question: “Why isn’t Donald Trump in jail?” Perhaps I tend to avoid these topics so that I don’t have to answer questions like that.
When Joe Biden announced his proposed reforms to the Supreme Court in July, he wrote, “If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power—like we saw on January 6, 2021—there may be no legal consequences.” He was describing the potential effect of the Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity. But as he knows well, Trump has thus far managed to evade legal consequences for his actions that day, which makes it all the more important that those of us who remember it accurately persist in speaking the truth.
I still hope the day will come when we can talk about January 6 as the lowest point in a journey to redemption. That is the story our tour guide in D.C. told, speaking solemnly about the members of Congress who went into hiding that day and then returned to the ransacked building “to finish the people’s work.” Thanks to them, he said, “we had a peaceful transfer of power.” As happy as I am that he told the story, I part ways with our guide at that conclusion: power was ultimately transferred, but it wasn’t peaceful. The reality and the danger of that eruption of violence weren’t canceled out by Joe Biden’s inauguration.
I keep hoping for the day when Trump will be over, like a bad dream—a day when we can look back on his presidency and his prominence in politics as a wrong turn that has since been righted. It seems likely that my children and I will soon be able to celebrate Trump’s defeat and the election of the first woman president. The trick, then, will be to bid farewell to the imminent threat of Trump without lying to ourselves about what he leaves behind.
