Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.This got me thinking: Did Trump really fail on January 6?
I don't know what Trump's plan was, but at minimum it was to save face. Trump wanted to be perceived as someone who went down fighting (even though he left the fighting to his followers, the way the owner of a resort might ask the help to tidy up the rose bushes). In that sense, he got what he wanted.
But I think it can be argued that January 6 was a success for Trump -- just not right away. During the "stop the steal" period after the 2020 election, Trump turned an electoral defeat into a Lost Cause. He persuaded millions of Americans that he was the legitimate winner. Then he dodged accountability -- he wasn't arrested, he wasn't convicted after impeachment, and he wasn't successfully prosecuted. Many of his followers went to prison, but he succeeded in making them martyrs -- martyrs whom ordinary Trump admirers found relatable. In the primaries, it's quite possible that he beat Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and other challengers precisely because of January 6 and "stop the steal." What Republican base voters want most of all is to own the libs. Even a vote for DeSantis, a tireless culture warrior, didn't seem as lib-owning as a vote for Trump, who had persuaded the base that the libs stole the presidency from him.
In the way that historians such as Heather Cox Richardson argue that the South ultimately won the Civil War, I think we can argue that Trump won January 6, even if it took four years for him to collect his winnings.
If fall arrives and Trump's Iran surrender has lowered gas prices to an approximation of where they were before the war, while he's persuading gullible rubes that he saved America from an imminent Iranian nuclear attack, then he might ultimately win this time, too. Maybe the outcome would change if Democrats were willing to compare and contrast Trump's deal with the nuclear deal negotiated during Barack Obama's presidency, which cost America nothing in blood and treasure -- but apart from Obama himself, Democrats have never been willing to defend that deal, much less boast about it.
So at the very least, I think Trump will emerge from this debacle in better shape than he's been for the past three months.
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