A Child’s Garden of Insurrection

Inside the White House’s attempt to turn a coup into a bedtime story

Five years after January 6, Donald Trump has decided the problem wasn’t the insurrection. The problem, apparently, was the historical record.

This week, the White House rolled out a new official website devoted to January 6, 2021, not as it happened, but as Trump now wishes it had happened. It reads less like a timeline than a hostage note written by reality under duress. According to this new version of events, the real crime that day wasn’t a mob storming the Capitol to stop the certification of a lawful election. No, the real crime was that the mob faced consequences afterward.

In Trump’s telling, the people who smashed windows, assaulted police officers, hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress, and erected a gallows outside the building were actually “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The judges, juries, and grand juries who convicted them were villains. The law enforcement officers who testified were part of a political hit squad. And the Constitution? A prop Democrats allegedly used to stage the real insurrection, the certification of Joe Biden’s election.

You could almost admire the audacity if it weren’t being hosted on the official White House website, paid for by taxpayers, wrapped in the authority of the presidency, and designed to fossilize a lie into public memory.

Joyce Vance calls it what it is: a dangerous revision of history. She’s right, and the danger isn’t rhetorical. This isn’t Trump ranting on Truth Social or workshopping grievances at a rally. This is the state laundering propaganda into something meant to be cited, linked, taught, and treated as fact. Under the Trump regime memory itself is a battlefield.

The site opens by celebrating Trump’s pardons of January 6 defendants, describing them as victims of “harsh solitary confinement,” “denied due process,” and “family separation”, language lifted straight from human rights reporting and repurposed to describe people convicted in U.S. courts after full trials, guilty pleas, and appeals. It’s a grotesque act of narrative theft. These are the very abuses that journalists, advocates, and courts are right now documenting under the Trump regime’s immigration policies: prolonged detention, family separation, punitive isolation, and the systematic erosion of due process for people who have committed no crime beyond seeking asylum. The White House website, however, reserves this language not for the children separated from their parents or migrants held indefinitely without hearings, but for insurrectionists caught on camera attacking police officers. It omits, of course, that January 6 prosecutions were the result of grand jury indictments, jury verdicts, and mountains of evidence, including video helpfully recorded by the defendants themselves. Acknowledging that would collapse the comparison, and the comparison is doing a lot of work here.

From there, the website does what all authoritarian rewrites do: blame the enemy, invert victim and perpetrator, and insist that only the leader can tell the truth. Democrats are accused of “gaslighting.” Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Republicans whose real crime was refusing to lie, are presented as co-conspirators. Nancy Pelosi is dragged in via selectively edited video, resurrecting a debunked claim that she somehow accepted responsibility for her own attempted assassination. It’s the kind of argument that collapses under even minimal scrutiny, which is why scrutiny is not invited.

Politico’s reporting makes clear this isn’t just Trump being Trump. It’s a coordinated project. The White House rewrite is part of a broader effort to normalize the idea that January 6 prosecutions were illegitimate, that Trump’s actions were benevolent, and that the insurrection itself was a misunderstanding at best, or, at worst, a Democratic false flag.

Trump, for his part, is leaning hard on a single line from his January 6 speech, the one about marching “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, as if repeating it often enough will erase everything that came before and after. He now claims the media never reported that phrase, which is impressive given that it was reported everywhere, repeatedly, and in full context. What he means, of course, is that the context is inconvenient.

Because the context matters. It matters that Trump spent months telling supporters the election was stolen. It matters that he told them they would “never concede.” It matters that he urged them to “fight,” praised their anger, and directed them toward the Capitol at the precise moment Congress was certifying the election. It matters that he watched the violence unfold on television and did nothing. And it matters that Jack Smith, after reviewing the evidence, reached a blunt conclusion that cuts through all the spin: the attack does not happen without Trump. It was carried out for his benefit, and it unfolded exactly because he set it in motion and then refused to stop it.

That’s the part the new White House website wants to sand down into a smooth, patriotic children’s book. One sentence about peacefulness, stripped of everything around it, held up like a legal disclaimer you slap on the back of a product you already know is defective. Not because it changes what happened, but because it gives the faithful something to repeat at Thanksgiving while staring aggressively at the gravy.

Here’s the problem for the White House’s little propaganda workshop: some of the people who were there refuse to participate in the rewrite. Pamela Hemphill is the kind of witness this new “official history” is built to erase. Not because she’s famous, powerful, or part of the political class, she’s none of those things, but because she’s the wrong kind of inconvenient. She’s not a Democrat trying to score points, or a Never-Trumper polishing a brand. She’s a former Trump supporter who went to Washington, got swept into the January 6 chaos, was convicted, served her sentence, and then did the one thing Trump’s revisionist project cannot survive: she stopped lying to herself.

Hemphill, once branded online as the “MAGA Granny,” a nickname she now tries to peel off like a stale bumper sticker, says plainly what the White House propaganda page can’t afford to admit. She wasn’t “unfairly targeted” or “overcharged” by shadowy bureaucrats. Nor was she a political prisoner persecuted for “exercising First Amendment rights.” She made choices and broke the law. “I was a volunteer,” she says. “I was guilty. I could have left. I made a choice to stay.” That is the opposite of Trump’s official storyline, which requires every participant to be an innocent tourist accidentally swept into the Capitol by a stiff breeze and the deep state’s sinister bike-rack choreography.

Her story also exposes the machinery behind the rewrite: the way misinformation becomes community, community becomes identity, and identity becomes a trap. Hemphill describes being drawn in by right-wing influencers and constitutional cosplay, not because she was uniquely monstrous, but because she wasn’t deeply informed and trusted the people around her. And then, this is the part that should make every editor of that White House website break into a cold sweat, she describes what got her out: researchers who demanded proof, receipts, links, evidence. Not vibes, and slogans, and definitely not “a guy on X said so.” The boring, deadly stuff: documentation.

And once she started airing facts about January 6, actual facts, MAGA didn’t debate her. Instead, they attacked, smeared, doxxed, and tried to silence anyone who even shared her work. That’s the tell: if your story is true, you don’t need to terrorize people into repeating it.

Trump’s new White House page frames his pardons as some humanitarian rescue mission, Nelson Mandela meets Save the Children, but with more flag pins. Hemphill refused the pardon. Think about what that means in a movement built on grievance monetization: she turned down the golden ticket that would have allowed her to rebrand her own accountability as persecution. She refused to be used as a prop in Trump’s attempt to flip the moral polarity of January 6, turning the perpetrators into victims and the defenders into villains.

So when the White House insists this was all “peaceful and patriotic,” Hemphill offers something far more dangerous than a counter-argument. She offers an exit ramp. A way out that requires the one thing Trump’s project can’t allow: admitting you were wrong.

If January 6 were truly harmless, Trump wouldn’t need to rewrite it. If the truth were on his side, it wouldn’t require an official website, selective video edits, and a propaganda campaign dressed up as historical correction. The sheer effort involved is the tell.

What makes this moment especially unsettling is that it’s happening in broad daylight, with remarkably little resistance from Republican leaders who know better and are choosing silence anyway. The goal isn’t just to rehabilitate Trump’s image. It’s to establish precedent. If January 6 can be rebranded as a Democratic insurrection, then any future attempt to overturn an election can be framed as patriotism in advance.

Nancy Pelosi put it plainly this week: January 6 was an attempted coup. It failed because public servants refused to bend. The Constitution held. That’s the version Trump is trying to erase, because it leaves no room for him as hero.

Joyce Vance ends by reminding readers that while Trump may temporarily control government websites and museums, he doesn’t control the public narrative unless we let him. That’s not naïve optimism. It’s a warning and a call to action.

History doesn’t just survive because it’s true. It survives because people insist on telling it, over and over, even when power tells them to stop. Trump’s rewrite is shameful. That it’s dangerous is precisely why it’s happening.