January 6, a day that will “live in infamy.” Well, perhaps only for some. On that day in 2025, a joint session of Congress certified Donald J. Trump's presidential election victory. And although it was obviously a bitter pill to swallow for some Democrats, they did not lodge a single objection to the count of electoral votes from any state. But this was a very transparent attempt to capture the moral high ground and to portray themselves as a party that accepts the outcomes of elections without protest. The reality, of course, is far different.
Even though no Democratic presidential candidate has inspired tens of thousands of supporters to stage a protest in Washington, DC. after losing an election, it would not be even remotely accurate to claim that Democrats accept the outcome of elections. In fact, one would have to go back to the 1988 presidential race, when Republican George H.W. Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, to record the last time a GOP presidential election victory was not contested by congressional Democrats.
There can be little doubt that the most tumultuous example of election denial began in 2016 when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. A host of prominent Democrats are on record as claiming that Trump was an illegitimate president because he was supposedly installed by the Russians. As is well documented, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party paid for the production of what will go down in history as the most consequential opposition research operation in presidential history. That was the so-called Steele dossier, a work of fiction that spurred an FBI – and then Department of Justice special counsel – investigation into a sitting and duly elected president.
If the term “threat to democracy” ever had any real meaning, then perhaps it should have been applied to Trump's political opponents, who put a great deal of time and effort, not to mention taxpayer money, into trying to persuade the American public that Trump was not fairly elected in 2016.
Bitter January 6 Pills
For outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris, January 6, 2025 must surely have been a very difficult day. As president of the Senate, she was required by the Constitution to oversee the certification of Electoral College votes – and, thus, her own defeat at the hands of the man she and her party have for years labeled an existential threat, a would-be dictator, and a fascist.
On social media, some leftists have been throwing around wild theories that Trump's victory would never be certified by the joint session of Congress on January 6. Almost inevitably, those same people will continue to theorize that, before Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, the tables will magically be turned and Kamala Harris will in fact be installed as the 47th president.
The election deniers from 2016 became the fierce defenders of electoral integrity in 2020 – and went back to being election deniers in 2024. Congressional Democrats may have tried to seize the moral high ground by not protesting the presidential election results this time around, but it seems they exercised restraint only so that they could retain the events of January 6, 2021 as a weapon against Donald Trump and his supporters. Perhaps, after four disastrous years of the Biden presidency, this is the only dead horse they have left to flog.
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