WASHINGTON, D.C. — In federal law, Jan. 6 is the day Congress meets to review and certify the electoral votes of each state. In the Christian church, Jan. 6, the 12th Day of Christmas, is the Epiphany, commemorating when the Magi arrived to honor Jesus as the Messiah.
Epiphany comes from Greek roots that could be translated roughly as “shining a light on.” An epiphany is when the truth is suddenly revealed. Christians celebrate the revelation that our savior arrived.
Trump supporters were looking for a different sort of epiphany on Wednesday.
“I’m hoping for a big information drop,” Kurt, a man of about 50 years, told me on his way to the Ellipse, to hear President Trump speak. “Today is supposed to be the day when we get some information,” he explained. Kurt had traveled from Omaha with his wife hungry for that information.
The promise of an Epiphany news drop was a rumor in certain corners of social media. Just ahead of the Electoral College certification, Trump, or someone, was expected to deliver the trove of information on voter fraud. Arrests would follow.
Every Trump supporter I asked near the White House and near the Capitol on Epiphany believed the election was probably or definitely stolen. Millions of people believe that, which helps explain why so many Republican lawmakers went along with the whole shameful farce. The lawmakers all got endless angry phone calls, emails, and letters demanding they “Stop the Steal.” It also explains why hundreds were willing to storm the Capitol and hundreds more were cheering them on. If you believed there was a coup in your country, you might be willing to take up arms to stop it.
That they believed they were stopping a coup can’t justify their actions, but it can inform our response.
Arresting dozens of rioters is necessary and just, but it won’t fix things. We’ll be rid of Trump soon, and maybe (hopefully) the Republican Party will even move beyond him, but that won’t repair the underlying problem. Trump lit the match, but the dry kindling was already there.
The kindling is a wide and deep distrust of all sources of information, bordering on a nihilism. It’s like a culture-wide paranoia — a spreading sense that you can’t trust anyone.
“This has been an election that was stolen,” stated Josh, about 30 years old, carrying a Trump flag on Constitution Avenue. Trump haters, Josh said, have been “galvanized by a mainstream media that is completely biased and completely brainwashing the people into … Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
The sense is widespread that there exists a hidden truth the elites don’t want you to know. Trump taps into that. When presenting his supposed evidence of fraud at his Epiphany rally, Trump explained, “These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort,” he said.
“They don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said. “In fact, when I started talking about that, I guarantee you a lot of the television sets and a lot of those cameras went off, but these are the things you don’t hear about. … You don’t hear it by the people who want to deceive you and demoralize you and control you, Big Tech, media.”
‘You lost our trust!’
Trump’s anti-media rhetoric doesn’t prevent most of his supporters from speaking to me on the record. But sometimes, a reporter’s notebook and some questions can trigger part of the crowd.
At the Capitol, I was interviewing two ladies in their 60s. The women called Mike Pence a coward for allowing the certification to go forward, and I asked them about Pence’s justification for his actions. That’s when an angry protester, a male about 30 years old, interrupted my interview to yell at me: “That’s bullshit.”
“He could’ve sent it back to the states. Pence could’ve sent it back. You are misinformed. … You’re making up the Constitution. You’re a reporter?”
I tried to continue the interview with the women. “He’s gonna twist your words, like every other media …” another young man piped in, warning the ladies.
I offered instead to report this young man’s thoughts. “No, I don’t want to talk to you. Why the hell would I talk to you?”
The words “reporter,” “media,” and “press” had floated around enough that a crowd gathered around me of media-haters, there to tell me how wretched I am and my colleagues are.
“We don’t trust the press!”
“Yeah! Get the hell out of here, bro.”
“You lost our trust!”
“Don’t assume we don’t know the Constitution. We do know the Constitution. YOU should learn it.”
“We made a decision because we’re rational,” one of my interlocutors said to explain why he agreed with the storming of the barricades, “and we heard a really good argument.”
I asked what the argument was, and one man said, “I’ll just refer you to the president, who quoted a whole bunch of things this morning. Look at what he said, and show me the evidence that that did not happen.”
“All we’re doing is saying, ‘show us that this WAS a legitimate election.’”
‘I want to see it’
Proving the election legitimate is an impossible task, of course — particularly in the face of Trump’s ever-shifting arguments. You can’t point to the findings of authorities, since authorities have lost the trust of the people questioning the election. You can’t even point to would-be friendly authorities, such as Republican Gov. Brian Kemp or Pence, because the moment they reject the conspiracy theory, they become traitors and cowards.
At the Capitol, the protesters surrounding me were demanding the counts be sent back to the states, but the counts had all come from the states, including from Republican-run states.
“Traitors,” Vicky from Pennsylvania explained.
“There’s a lot of traitors,” Charles echoed.
If Pence and Fox News are traitors, whom do you trust?
“We’ve been getting into Epoch Times,” Charles from Lancaster told me. David from Colorado cited, “The Epoch Times and One America News. And I like the X22 Report.”
“Fox News is pretty poor anymore,” said Vicky, who has turned to Newsmax. “We stopped watching Fox,” agreed Charles. “They went left.”
Ronnie from Ocala, Florida, told me, “I think there’s more in the way of the computer taking votes, flipping votes away from Trump. By my understanding, they had not only spikes UP for Biden, they had spikes down for Trump — within seconds.”
Where does he get all this? “To be honest with you, I’ve switched from Fox to some of these more conservatives, like NTD, Newsmax.” He cited Fox’s premature call of Arizona for his distrust of that network.
Ronnie, however, despairs over the inability to find reliable sources of news. “I can’t hardly find anything that will actually tell me what’s actually going on.”
“We’ll never know,” David from Colorado said when I asked him if he believes Trump won. “It’s deny the truth, deny whatever, for self-preservation.”
Kurt sounded the same note in the morning as we walked down 15th Street: “There’s so much disinformation out there, you don’t know what to believe.”
That’s why Kurt was impatient even with Trump’s promise of evidence. “I don’t want to hear it. I want to see it.” There’s an aching and tragic desire to know with certainty in this age where nobody is willing to trust an authority. Recounts, audits, canvasses can’t convince someone who believes that algorithms were hacked or ballots were discarded or forged. Even if somehow you saw all the ballots, you could still worry that someone did something along the way.
A presidential election is not something you can see with your own eyes.
If you’re not willing to trust an authority, you’ll never arrive at certainty about very much in life, especially in our massive country and this age of high technology. More and more today, we need to just take people’s words for things. Even car engines are harder to repair, as so much is based on trusting a computer code. Yet, in an increasingly de-institutionalized culture, more and more people are trying to craft a bespoke understanding of the world.
“I do my own research,” Kurt said.
That’s a familiar phrase to any reporter who talks to ordinary people and to anyone who has witnessed a Facebook debate. It’s always reason to worry. “I do my own research,” on the surface conveys a healthy skepticism, but in reality, signals a credulity toward the claims of fringe figures.
But if it’s a fringe figure, a YouTube channel your friends don’t know about, an odd message board no reporter would ever cite, it can feel like you discovered it, and so you’re choosing whom you trust rather than having it thrust upon you by gatekeepers.
‘I do my own studies’
This distrust, this hope to find some truth in Trump or the like, isn’t just politics. It’s a deeper existential question, maybe a spiritual question.
David, an auto mechanic from Colorado, told me how pleased he was with Trump’s first term. It wasn’t about tax cuts or border walls, either. “He brought some pride back into the country. … No more. I feel pride. I feel like there’s something that was missing that’s now been found.”
His talk was spiritual, so I asked David about faith and church. “I don’t go to church. But I am religious. I do read the Bible. I do my own studies, online and stuff. But really, since Trump came in, I really have felt a shift in the power I feel. It’s definitely more positive than it was before.”
Ronnie sounded the same. He spoke of his Christian values, and I asked about church. He said, “Honestly, I just read the Bible.”
I got the same answer from the Alabama family I met walking to the Capitol. They haven’t gone to church in years, but they seek to raise their children with Christian values.
This is the story of the protests, the riots, the belief in a stolen election, and Trump’s election in the first place. Millions of people feel alienated in our modern world, where they feel they have to fly blind or trust authorities who don’t deserve their trust.
It’s no coincidence Trump won his first win, the 2016 GOP primary, by dominating among those who don’t go to church. The people who flocked to Trump in 2016, who visit the QAnon websites today, who showed up at the White House for an epiphany, and who stormed the Capitol hours later — they were all looking for something to believe in.
