Five years after the rioting at the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump and his administration are still trying to rewrite the truth of what really happened on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to turn a day of violence and mayhem led by White supremacists into what Trump called “a day of love.”

It was anything but that, of course. Trump’s crush of several thousand supporters injured more than 150 police officers in one of the most violent days for law enforcement in modern U.S. history. The mob, armed with weapons, shields and chemical irritants, ground the wheels of democracy to a halt for nearly five hours inside the Capitol as they stopped the normally routine certification of a presidential election that Trump wrongfully claimed he had won.

Far from a love-in, the racist regalia on display that day from hundreds of White supremacists – Confederate flags, neo-Nazi insignia, nooses, antisemitic apparel reading “Camp Auschwitz” and “6MWE” (6 million wasn’t enough,” an allusion to the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust) – spoke to the darker, not-so-veiled agenda from extremist groups like the Proud Boys, which Trump had famously instructed to “stand back and stand by” barely three months earlier in a presidential debate with Joe Biden before the 2020 election. For them, it was about stopping the election and displaying White power.

The time-worn adage made famous by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tells us that we’ll be doomed to repeat history if we don’t remember it. But on the fifth anniversary of the Capitol rioting, Trump gives us a more urgent reason for remembering history ‒ by trying to reinvent that infamous day as a peaceful and patriotic occasion or, as he has recently........

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