The meh-ification of Jan. 6 [washingtonpost]

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/06/jan-6-american-attitudes-polling-trump/

The meh-ification of Jan. 6

Trump has rewritten the narrative of that day with his base, but the bigger story is that people — including independents — stopped caring as much.

January 6, 2025

Tear gas is fired at supporters of President Donald Trump while they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

Analysis by Aaron Blake

Four years ago, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters, spurred by his false and ridiculous claims of voter fraud, stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss. Today, on a snowy Monday, Congress convened to take the penultimate step in returning Trump to the presidency.

That once-unthinkable-to-many scenario — including to high-profile Republicans — has launched all manner of retrospectives

Politically, the conventional wisdom is that Trump has successfully rewritten the narrative; he’s “retconned” it, to use a popular term. And it’s not just an academic question; as Trump prepares to pardon many participants in the Capitol insurrection, perceptions of that day will matter when it comes to how practical that decision will be and how it will reflect on Trump.

But the more accurate description might be that, with a nudge from Trump, people just stopped caring as much.

Polling has regularly shown that, despite Trump’s efforts, Americans have hardly adopted his views on Jan. 6.

On the third anniversary of that date, they said by a 5-to-1 margin that the events that day “threatened democracy” rather than defended it (seemingly by trying to right a purported injustice). A majority said Trump was probably guilty of a crime for his actions. Just one-quarter of Americans said the penalties for Jan. 6 defendants were “too harsh,” as Trump does.

And while polling since then is sparser, things didn’t appear to shift too much during the 2024 election as Trump pressed his case.

AP-NORC polling from just before the election showed a majority said Trump bore at least “quite a bit” of responsibility for that day. An Ipsos poll this past summer showed a majority were inclined to believe that Trump had “tried to incite a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.” Only about one-third doubted that.

And an Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed just 15 percent of Americans approved of those who stormed the Capitol — people whom Trump has more or less lionized and even spoken of as if they are kindred spirits.

But that same poll gets at perhaps the biggest story here. And that’s that people — probably through a combination of fading memories and Trump muddying the waters — have adopted a more “meh” attitude toward such a seminal political moment.

After the dust settled on the insurrection four years ago, YouGov showed Americans overwhelmingly agreed on the very basic threshold question of whether the rioters were bad. More than 8 in 10 Americans and even three-quarters of Republicans disapproved of them. More than 7 in 10 Americans “strongly” disapproved.

Today, though, those numbers have fallen substantially. The most recent Economist/YouGov poll shows the percentage of Republicans who disapprove of the rioters has dropped to 50 percent. And the percentage who strongly disapprove has dropped even more, from 55 percent to 24 percent.

That many of Trump’s most devoted supporters ultimately go along with his version of events, regardless of the evidence, shouldn’t be too surprising. We’ve seen this over and over again.

But what’s perhaps most notable when it comes to how Trump won and how strongly people might object to the looming pardons, is how things have shifted beyond his base. The political middle, too, has stopped caring as much. Two-thirds of independents still disapprove of the rioters, but the percentage who strongly disapprove has dropped from 67 percent to 50 percent.

That suggests that only about half of the political middle is truly animated by this topic.

The biggest movement hasn’t been from “Jan. 6 bad” to “Jan. 6 good,” but rather from “Jan. 6 bad” to people saying they’re “not sure” just how bad it is — which for some might just be “I don’t care enough to say.” Just 9 percent of Americans declined to offer a verdict in January 2021; today, 19 percent do.

We see this in the pardon numbers, too.

Polling has regularly shown Americans lean significantly against the idea of pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, generally by about 2 to 1. Very few Americans — only about one-quarter in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago — regard their sentences as “too harsh.”

But the new YouGov poll shows just 39 percent of Americans and of independents “strongly” disapprove of such pardons.

In other words, as with so many things Trump-related, the opposition has lost much of its fight and decided other things are more important. And the passage of time has again proved one of Trump’s greatest allies.