Trump White House Publishes Government-Sanctioned Lies About January 6

Shay Horse/NurPhoto via AP

The Trump White House has published a government-sanctioned series of bonkers lies about the January 6 attack on its official website, formally abandoning the premise that presidential power should be constrained by evidence, courts, or shared reality.

The newly launched The WhiteHouse.gov page does not merely reinterpret January 6 and dispute prosecutorial judgment. It asserts falsehoods as fact about one of the most exhaustively documented events in modern American history, using the institutional authority of the federal government to overwrite the evidentiary record. This is not another escalation in President Donald Trump’s long war on truth. It is the elimination of the line itself.

Consider one claim presented as settled history: that many January 6 defendants were guilty of “nothing more than peacefully walking through the Capitol.” That assertion is not debatable. It is false. Courts found hundreds of defendants guilty, many by their own plea, of assaulting police officers, obstructing Congress, destroying property, and coordinating violent breaches. Jurors convicted defendants based on hours of video footage showing officers beaten with flagpoles, chemical spray deployed in tunnels, and lawmakers fleeing for their lives. The White House now insists those facts did not happen, even though they were proven repeatedly under oath.

The page goes further, claiming that nine people “lost their lives” for “peacefully walking through the Capitol.” This collapses distinct and well-established causes of death into a single political narrative. Ashli Babbitt was shot while attempting to breach a barricaded hallway protecting members of Congress. Others died of heart attacks, accidental overdose, or suicide in the months that followed. No court, coroner, or investigation concluded these deaths were caused by persecution for peaceful protest. The White House presents this fiction as moral fact, without caveat or evidence.

Please do not confuse this with trolling or even spin. Spin bends facts. This denies they exist.

The timing underscores the intent. The publication arrives on the fifth anniversary of January 6, the first such anniversary with Trump back in office. It pointedly erases how the violence was fomented: Trump’s months-long campaign to convince supporters the 2020 election had been stolen, despite losing dozens of court cases and failing to produce evidence. That lie culminated in a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 itself, after which supporters marched to the Capitol, and the protest Trump encouraged metastasized into violence. The White House account severs that causal chain entirely, treating the attack as an unprovoked injustice inflicted on innocent people.

The White House accomplishes this rewrite by laundering its claims through the House Administration Subcommittee’s interim report released under Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a partisan document that advances the long-running theory that January 6 was exaggerated, engineered, or weaponized against Trump. That report, rejected by Democrats and at odds with prior bipartisan investigations, court findings, and sworn testimony, is treated on WhiteHouse.gov as definitive history. In elevating a contested minority report over jury verdicts, guilty pleas, and video evidence, the administration is not supplementing the record but replacing it — transforming a political argument into an official government account.

It also names names. The site accuses former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson of fabricating testimony and claims Liz Cheney coached witnesses, allegations that have not been sustained by any court. Hutchinson testified under oath, subject to penalty of perjury. The White House is now officially branding her a liar using .gov infrastructure. That is not reinterpretation. It is character assassination, archived as part of the presidential record.

Defenders will argue this is Trump correcting the record. That defense collapses under conservatives’ own words. On January 6 and in the days that followed, Republican leaders and right-leaning media figures described the attack in unmistakable terms. Senator Mitch McConnell called it a “failed insurrection.” Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Trump bore responsibility. On the Senate floor, Senator Lindsey Graham said he was “done” with Trump. The new White House narrative requires pretending those statements were never made and that Americans did not watch police beaten and the Capitol overrun in real time.

Equally revealing is the mechanism. This page did not publish itself. Career staff maintain WhiteHouse.gov. Communications officials reviewed it. Lawyers cleared it. Infrastructure built to document governance is now being used to disseminate false history. Whether through coercion, compliance, or exhaustion, the institution is participating.

The precedent is profound. If a .gov website can publish demonstrable lies about January 6, what constrains future administrations from doing the same about COVID deaths, election results, war casualties, or economic data? The danger is not one false page. It is a new operating system, where facts exist only by executive permission.

Much of the media will cover this as a pardon story. It is not. Pardons are legal acts. This is something else entirely: the state asserting itself as the sole arbiter of truth.

Five years after January 6, the Trump White House is no longer disputing reality. It is attempting to replace it. The only unanswered question is what, if anything, remains to stop it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.