I don’t know what will happen now that the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to appear on the presidential ballot. There is no precedent for implementing the 14th Amendment’s ban on candidates who supported insurrection. But there’s also no precedent for a president seeking to subvert the results of an election he lost by summoning a mob of supporters to the White House and then unleashing it on Congress to prevent the peaceful transition of power.

What I do know is that attempts to seek accountability for the events of January 6, 2021, are playing out in an environment in which the Trumpist media have developed a twisted alternate narrative of that insurrection. The right-wing stars conservatives trust most have spent the last few years downplaying the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol. They've largely succeeded in convincing the Republican base and the party’s politicians to follow them, creating a stark partisan divide over whether it was wrong for Trump to try to overturn American democracy. And after portraying Trump’s federal and state election subversion charges as illegitimate attacks on democracy, they’re now doing the same thing for the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision.

The right-wing effort to minimize January 6 and Trump’s role in fomenting it began that very day. Fox hosts who knew better told their viewers that Trump’s supporters had been responding to reasonable fears that the election had been stolen, while any violence may have been caused by antifa interlopers.

In the intervening years, Trumpist media stars — led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson — cosseted their viewers with a slew of lies about January 6. There was no “insurrection,” just a “political protest [that] got out of hand” in which “the overwhelming majority” of participants were “orderly and meek.” The rioter shot and killed by law enforcement while trying to breach the speaker’s gallery was a martyr, while the officers who were nearly beaten to death during the attack deserve mockery. The violence was orchestrated by undercover federal agents as part of a sinister plot to imprison patriotic Americans for their conservative views. The events were comparable to staffers for a late-night talk show shooting an unauthorized video in the Capitol complex, or a Democratic congressman foolishly pulling a fire alarm, or progressive protests at state capitols.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.