The January 6th Gaslight

Trauma, Erasure, and the Cost of Letting Violence Go Unanswered

I have a friend who was abused by her husband for many, many years. He didn’t hit her daily, not even monthly for the most part, but when he did hit her, he hit her hard. A closed fist punch to the face, a powerful kick in the stomach, he even grasped her throat once and began to strangle her before the toddler playing in another room began to cry, forcing him to release his hold on her neck.

In each instance, he would admit to what he had done, but he would only do so while also blaming her for the reason he “had” to do it to her at all. “You see what you made me do? I don’t want to have to punch you like that. You just don’t know when to [fill in the excuse]…”

But he would, at least in the immediate wake of the abuse, acknowledge that it had in fact happened. My friend didn’t know what to do. She was ashamed and afraid and she didn’t want to admit to anyone that her perfect looking life was actually incredibly dark, violent and scary. So, she maintained the facade while taking more of the abuse. She didn’t tell a soul.

Until one day, she’d finally had enough, she was broken, she was suicidal, she was falling apart, and she told someone she worked with. That was the very first person she’d ever told. And it was both terrifying and liberating for her to finally let someone else in. To let them see what was going on behind the smile.

Little by little, she told more people. Close friends cried with her over some wine in someone’s kitchen, phone calls and text chains of support. Slowly, day by day, she stopped feeling ashamed of what had been done TO her. Eventually, she began to understand that it needed to end. That she needed to get out.

And then all of the sudden, whenever she would bring any of the incidents up with her husband, instead of blaming her like he had always done, he began denying they had happened at all.

Conversations they had in the past, conversations she KNEW they had about what he’d done, he said never took place.

She began to think she was losing her mind. She began to question her own sanity. It all became so blurry. Her memories were muddling together, the sights and sounds of what she knew she’d been through were becoming hazy. His constant gaslighting was dizzying.

And he knew it worked, because whenever she would say their marriage needed to end, and cite one of those times when he’d hurt her, he’d tell her she had lost her mind. That she wasn’t well. That she had convinced herself of events that never happened.

Events she went through. Pain she experienced. The trauma of being punched in the face while her kids slept in the next room. Of being strangled, forced to have intercourse, slapped, kicked, threatened… but he just looked at her straight in the face and said it never happened.

He wouldn’t admit to any of it anymore. In fact, to this day he never has. Other than a brief mention of “losing his temper once or twice” in a divorce filing (she did eventually get out) and a random passing comment in front of their child’s therapist.

They share a horrible, terrible, painful, unreconciled truth but only one of them will admit it ever happened. The one responsible for the violence has washed it all away. My friend carries it with her at all times. It never really goes away.

That’s what January 6th feels like. MAGA is the history-erasing ex and we are all my gaslit girlfriend.

We all watched it unfold in some fashion. We either watched it in real time, heard it on the news in the car, got the alerts on our phones, we ALL watched it or listened to the events of that day. We all LIVED it.

And it was shocking. It was surreal. There wasn’t a gradual lead up to the events of that day. We hadn’t seen smaller versions of what was taking place. There were men dressed in tactical gear beating the police officers and smashing in windows and calling out for the Vice President’s head and no matter who you were or where you were or in most cases, how you voted, it was as shocking as 9/11 or the Challenger explosion, or a whole host of infamously tragic events this country has had to endure.

January 6 was trauma. National trauma. Collective trauma. The kind that lodges itself deep in the nervous system of a country and refuses to loosen its grip.

That night, my kids asked me if those bad men were going to come to our house next.

I remember the sound of their voices when they asked—thin, unsteady, already bracing. I pulled them close and told them no. Told them they were safe. Told them it was far away. Told them what parents are supposed to tell their children so they can sleep.

And after they cried themselves quiet, after the house finally went still, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, realizing I had just lied to them.

Not because I wanted to.

Because I had to.

Because I didn’t actually know the answer.

Because we had just witnessed something no one ever imagined they would see here. An attack on our own Capitol. A violent, deadly assault carried out on American soil. Not by a foreign enemy. Not by some distant threat. But by our own people—at the urging of an outgoing president who refused to accept reality.

And it was obvious that Donald Trump was not stopping it.

Violence like that would have been shut down instantly anywhere else. At a stadium. At a protest. At any public gathering. But no one came. I remember shouting at the television, asking where the help was.

There was none.

Because the person responsible was watching.

For 187 minutes, Donald Trump did nothing. He watched. He brushed aside pleas. He ignored warnings that his Vice President was in danger.

We ALL watched him do nothing.

We watched police officers—outnumbered, overwhelmed—fight with everything they had.

Officer Michael Fanone was beaten so badly he suffered a heart attack. Officers were sprayed with chemical agents that burned eyes and lungs. They were struck with flagpoles and fire extinguishers. With fists and boots and a level of rage that felt feral.

And every terrorist who did those things was later pardoned by Donald Trump. The man who summoned them. He pardoned them all.

Every single one.

They are walking free today.

Some of them are walking the grounds of the very Capitol they violently attacked, moving through that space as if it belongs to them now.

If that does not enrage you, I genuinely don’t know what to say.

In the immediate aftermath, there was only one version of that day.

The truth.

But the truth wasn’t softened with time. It wasn’t gently blurred or dulled at the edges.

It was dismantled and rebuilt into its opposite.

The attack became “patriotism.”

The violence became “legitimate political discourse.”

The terrorists who beat police officers, smashed windows, hunted lawmakers, and erected a gallows were recast as heroes or “hostages”.

Ashli Babbitt was turned into a martyr. Her family was given five million dollars in taxpayer money.

And the officers who took those blows—who absorbed shields and flagpoles and baseball bats with their own bodies—were ignored. Left to fight for medical care. Left to struggle to pay bills. Left to carry trauma quietly while the people who hurt them were celebrated.

One life was sanctified.

The others were discarded.

That’s not forgetting.

That’s erasure.

And now, one year after Donald Trump pardoned every terrorist involved in the January 6 attack, the trauma is not only unresolved—it has been deepened.

Because accountability matters. Closure matters.

My friend never got either.

The man who abused her never faced real reckoning. And that absence of accountability became its own permanent wound.

That is what has been done to this country.

Since those pardons, at least thirty-three of those terrorists have gone on to commit new crimes—some of them violently so. Child sexual abuse. Kidnapping. Domestic violence by strangulation. Conspiracy to murder FBI agents. Armed robbery. Illegal weapons possession. DUI manslaughter.

New victims. New harm. New lives altered in ways that cannot be undone.

This is what happens when terrorism is rewarded.

“Democracy rarely dies in a single moment… It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe.”

- How Democracies Die

Donald Trump getting away with January 6—and being rewarded with power—did not close a chapter. It opened the door. It told him there was no real line. No lasting consequence. No memory strong enough to stop him.

He attacked democracy once and paid no price. Of course he kept going. Of course he went after institutions, guardrails, accountability itself.

A plurality of the dumbest people in this country handed him the keys and the blowtorch.

Donald Trump is a monster.

A loud, grasping, cruel presence that moves through people the way fire moves through dry brush. He senses vulnerability and goes straight for it. He presses where it hurts. He stays there until something gives.

He crowds. He mocks. He humiliates. He feeds on the moment a room tightens and someone breaks. Humiliation is his currency.

That presence hung over January 6.

Not confusion.

Not accident.

Intent.

Police crushed against doors. Hands slick with blood and sweat. Chemical spray searing eyes and lungs. Bodies shoved forward by bodies behind them. The dull, hollow sound of metal striking bone.

And somewhere else—safe, still, untouched—that monster watched.

He waited. He counted on exhaustion. He counted on denial. He counted on time doing his work for him.

And when people refused to forget—when they kept naming what happened—he punished them for remembering.

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

- Orwell, 1984

And like my friend, this country never got closure.

Never got accountability.

Never got to see the harm fully named and answered.

But we know what happened.

We know what we lived through.

And we are not going to let that truth be erased.

Because memory is not optional in a democracy. It is structural. It is the line between survival and collapse. A nation that erases its trauma doesn’t heal—it breaks again, deeper.

When an abuser is rewarded and the victim is told to move on, the abuse doesn’t end.

It gets worse.

Anyone who wants that for this country—more trauma, more violence, more lies, more sanctioned cruelty—can fuck all the way off. Seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.

And that is all I have to say about that.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Please stay safe, stay outraged, and keep holding on to the truth with both hands. Every single day.

💙 Jo