October 31, 2025

I often begin my essays to you with quotations from history or literature. I do this to demonstrate that our fight for democracy and against authoritarianism is not so different from what people have confronted before.

My goal is to use history to help contextualize the world we live in, even if it cannot, by itself, explain it. I always try to make clear that we are neither predestined to succeed in our fight for democracy nor guaranteed to fail.

As a result, there are certain texts, authors, and circumstances I have avoided because they are, in my view, too easy to connect. The parallels are so close that I fear my larger argument might be swallowed by the quotation or reference itself.

That is why I have avoided references to George Orwell’s “1984.” From time to time, I find myself rereading all or part of it. It always lands hard. It is that power that has made me hold back. But this week, it was that very power — the overwhelming force of Orwell’s prose — that came rushing into my mind and ultimately onto the page.

Central to Orwell’s tale is the Ministry of Truth. Winston Smith, “1984’s” rebellious protagonist, begins the novel working there — rewriting history and altering statistics to fit neatly with the totalitarian Party’s agenda. In Orwell’s words: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

Donald Trump has lied about every election he has ever participated in. He lied about the results of primaries he lost in 2016, and after winning the general election that year, he lied about fraud tainting the results in states he lost.

Most infamously, Trump lied about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. That lie — the Big Lie — has become the central plank of the MAGA identity. If every movement has an uncompromising core, MAGA’s is this: the belief that Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him.

In his mythology, Trump is the victim, those of us who protected free and fair elections are the villains, and his supporters are the righteous. I have long known this false narrative exists. Hardly a day goes by that I am not subjected to some form of hate or election denial rooted in the lies Trump spreads.

But recently, I have come to understand that Trump is not merely trying to tell a different story — he is trying to erase the truth.

This is an important distinction. Trump is no longer satisfied with competing narratives. He wants only one. Achieving that means not only changing how history is described but also erasing our collective memory.

As Orwell wrote: “All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.’”

The problem for many of us is that we remember Jan. 6, 2021. I was in Washington, D.C., cleaning up the last of Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuits. As the images unfolded live on TV, it was terrifying. I watched in shock and horror as a violent mob stormed the Capitol —scaling the walls, attacking security officers, and threatening to kill the vice president.

Their goal was to prevent Congress from certifying the outcome of the 2020 election on the date prescribed in the U.S. Constitution. Their erroneous belief was that if state certificates were destroyed, if the Capitol was ransacked, if Congress could not convene, Donald Trump would remain in office indefinitely.

Those are memories that cannot be erased.

In the days that followed, I remember thinking that future generations would one day learn about Jan. 6. I thought they would ask what it was like to see the insurrection unfold before our eyes. I hoped they would recite the dates, the names, and the sequence of events because our democracy had survived. 

I now understand that this is not the reality we are living in. Donald Trump does not want anyone to hear my memories — or yours — of Jan. 6, 2021.

What brought me to this horrific realization was an otherwise mundane incident involving two career prosecutors who were placed on leave just hours after filing a sentencing memo in a case against Taylor Taranto, a former Jan. 6 defendant who subsequently brought illegal guns to President Barack Obama’s house. 

In the memo, the prosecutors accurately wrote that on Jan. 6 “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol.”

My first reaction to their suspension for writing these words was dismay but not shock. We have seen many career DOJ lawyers reprimanded or fired for telling courts the truth. This seemed like just the latest example of the Department’s overt politicization.

But then, after their suspension, the DOJ quietly scrubbed the memo that had been filed with the court — removing all references to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s social media post that inspired Taranto to bring guns to President Obama’s home.

When asked about the changes, the U.S. attorney and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said, “I think the papers speak for themselves.” On that, we can agree.

I was not surprised that Trump pardoned Jan. 6 rioters, nor that he continues to lie. But the erasure of history — the removal of facts from court filings — is something altogether different.

In “1984,” Orwell wrote, “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

This is Donald Trump’s long game: to rewrite the violent history that cements his authoritarian regime. To erase all election losses. To scrub the failures from our history books.

My advice to you — my request of you — is to hold on to your memories dearly. Write them down. Share them widely. Stand firm in our truths. If we stay silent, our past will be altered right before our eyes.

Do not give Trump that power. Do not let him change our past to suit the new history that sustains his authoritarian regime.

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