Lost in Lualand

Back in 2015, when Trump had begun his presidential campaign, Webster hadn’t taken him seriously, because he “said some crazy-ass stuff.” Webster thought of himself as a traditional, small-government, libertarian-leaning Reagan Republican; he’d supported Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary. Now, though, he began to find Trump’s bombast refreshing. In the president’s words, Webster heard echoes of his own thoughts about the strangulating overreach of an authoritarian government. Some of what Trump said about foreign policy also began to resonate with Webster, particularly his statements about wanting America to quit its “forever wars,” because he worried about his daughter in the Marines.

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Over the course of 2020, Webster found himself pulled more and more deeply into the MAGA camp. The concept of “Make America Great Again” seemed pretty brilliant to him. Who could argue with it? Webster had been disappointed to see the Obama administration go on what he thought was an endless apology tour around the world. Trump, in contrast, embraced the country and was unabashed in putting America first. “I really appreciated that,” Webster told me recently. “I didn’t view MAGA as ‘extremism.’ I viewed it as a sense of patriotism, a love of God and family and country.”

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We won this election, and we won it by a landslide,” he said. After telling them to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, in order to give Republicans the courage to reject the certification, he shifted to inflaming them: “We fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He told them to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Congress was beginning the certification proceedings, and said that he would go with them. (He did not go with them.)

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But within hours of the attack on the Capitol, an alternative narrative was already forming. On her show the evening of January 6, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham wondered aloud whether antifa sympathizers had infiltrated the crowd. Before long, a chorus of conservative-media personalities, far-right lawmakers, and family members of rioters was suggesting that the reports of savagery had been overblown; that the events of that day had been more peaceful protest than violent insurrection; that the real insurrection had been on November 3, when the election was stolen.
By March, Trump was telling Ingraham live on Fox News that the crowd had posed “zero threat right from the start” and that protesters had been “hugging and kissing” the police. By the fall, Trump and other prominent MAGA figures were regularly referring to the rioters turned defendants as “patriots” and “political hostages.” January 6, Trump would later say, was “a day of love.” News clips featured residents of the “Patriot Pod,” a unit at the D.C. jail that housed January 6 defendants, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” every night—and before long, Trump was playing a recording of their rendition at the start of his political rallies. On his Fox News show a year after the insurrection, Tucker Carlson said, “January 6 barely rates as a footnote. Really not a lot happened that day, if you think about it.” Representative Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana, has said, “The whole thing was a nefarious agenda to entrap MAGA Americans.” Shortly after the first anniversary of January 6, Trump mentioned the possibility of pardoning the defendants if he were reelected.

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In November 2024, when Americans reelected Trump, Hodges felt a deep sense of grief. During 11 years of policing, he’d seen people do terrible things to one another—shootings, stabbings, maimings. But the election results strained his faith in humanity more than any of that. After all Trump has done? Hodges thought. After all we know about him? His friend Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who’d been called “nigger” for the first time while in uniform on January 6, later said that seeing the 2024 election unfold was like watching the end of Titanic : You knew what was coming, but it still hurt to watch. Both Dunn and Hodges long ago grew tired of talk about the “shifting narrative” of January 6. “Ain’t no narrative,” Dunn likes to say. “Play the tape.”

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Still, Hodges hoped that there would be some nuance in who received pardons. There was not. Trump did not weigh each case like Solomon: He issued full pardons to almost all of the 1,600 people charged in connection with the insurrection. Of those, about 600 had been charged with resisting arrest or assaulting officers, 175 of them with dangerous or deadly weapons. No matter how big their sin, no matter what all of those judges and juries had decided, almost everyone was just—poof—forgiven. The only (partial) exceptions were the 14 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys whose sentences Trump commuted, meaning they were released from prison but their convictions were not erased.

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Recently, I told Hodges that I’d been interviewing Tom Webster about January 6. Hodges vaguely remembered the story about the former NYPD cop who’d assaulted one of his colleagues. When I told him that Webster still believed that the 2020 election may have been stolen, Hodges was not surprised. He doesn’t think people like Webster will stop lying to themselves anytime soon. “They can’t,” Hodges said; the cognitive dissonance and moral pain would be too great.
Accepting reality would mean reevaluating everything they thought they knew—that their actions were ethical and justified, that they are great patriots. Accepting the truth of January 6 would require coming to grips with the fact that they supported a con man and participated in a violent plot to subvert democracy. The immediate reward for undertaking this kind of hard self-examination would mainly be shame and regret.
“To grapple with these truths would, in a very real way, unmake them,” Hodges said.

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I pointed out to Webster that he had apologized to Officer Rathbun in court. Wasn’t that a concession that he’d acted wrongly on January 6? In response, Webster said that, although he feels “bad about how the whole day went down,” his apology should not be taken as an admission of guilt: “I was pressured by my lawyer to apologize. He said it would help me reduce my sentence.”

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Webster is disappointed by where things stand now: With Trump in office and MAGA conservatives in power, they finally have the ability to prove what happened that day—so why aren’t they? When Dan Bongino was a podcaster, he repeatedly asserted that undercover agents embedded in the crowd had helped orchestrate January 6; now that Trump has made him deputy director of the FBI, why isn’t Bongino releasing the evidence? Webster feels similarly disappointed in FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Why are you guys always bragging about arresting illegal Mexicans doing roof work?” he asked. He wonders why they’re not instead exposing the plots of the deep state, as Trump has demanded. Webster believes that Bongino and Patel have become polluted by the same swamp that Trump has again and again vowed to clean up.

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As Webster looked out at the members of the crowd, he thought they’d probably Google him when they got home. Which video clip would they find? he wondered—would it tell the right story or the wrong one? Would they see him as a felon or a patriot? Which truth would they believe?
On his way home, Webster told his wife that he wouldn’t speak at any more events. Reliving what they’d been through was too painful. And he didn’t see much point until the whole story was revealed. So he waits for the truth to solidify into something firm enough to stand on, a day he fears may never come.