A federal prosecutor who worked on a Jan. 6 case told NBC News this week, “The sky is blue, the Earth is round, and Jan. 6 was a historically violent day that will forever be a stain on this country’s history. Political convenience does not change the facts.”
As incontrovertible as they may be, the White House wants to change the facts anyway. My MS NOW colleague Julianne McShane reported:
On the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the White House unveiled a new webpage recasting President Donald Trump as a hero and blaming Democrats and Capitol Police for the violence that erupted after Trump beckoned his supporters to Capitol Hill to ‘fight like hell.’
Many of the claims on the new site — published Tuesday and promoted on social media by White House officials — are false.
I’m mindful that many political observers have grown inured to routine dishonesty from the incumbent president and his team, but this reaches a whole other level. Philip Bump wrote a detailed piece for MS NOW that documented the website’s many lies and described the White House’s Jan. 6 website as “disgraceful.” CNN’s Daniel Dale called it “a truly bananas up-is-down fake-history” website about what happened on Jan. 6 and in the 2020 election.
I wrote an entire book about Republican efforts to rewrite recent history, which included a lengthy chapter on Jan. 6, and even I found myself saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” while reviewing the White House’s truly bonkers assertions.
But there’s a larger concern amid the delusional, reality-defying claims Team Trump published about the attack on the Capitol: These lies weren’t posted to the president’s social media platform — they were put on an official, taxpayer-funded online resource that the public is supposed to be able to rely on for accurate information.
This problem comes up far more often than it should.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website on vaccines and autism was changed for political reasons. So was the covid.gov website. And the Federal Communications Commission’s website. And the Defense Department’s website. There was a time when Americans could reasonably expect official government resources such as these to include reliable facts. In 2026, however, these websites are little more than propaganda tools. A month into Trump’s first term, Meredith Bohen wrote a memorable piece for Vox, noting her work as a White House fact-checker during Barack Obama’s presidency. “When I say we checked every fact, that’s not an exaggeration,” she wrote, adding, “The culture the Obama administration had for valuing factual accuracy didn’t come by default — the tone was set at the top. President Obama’s respect for facts and data pervaded the entire White House, and he never made it a secret.” Nine years later, the White House’s respect for facts and data has taken a calamitous turn — but the tone is still being set at the top.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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