As the first anniversary of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot (or insurrection, or attempted coup, or whatever your preferred nomenclature) draws near, investigations into those events are making it increasingly clear that what happened that day was part of an extremely serious effort by Donald Trump and his cronies to subvert American democracy by invalidating the results of a legitimate election. Conservative commentators may be right when they argue that the rioters were not engaged in an actual attempt to “overthrow the federal government.” But the “peaceful” march on the Capitol by Trump supporters whom the president exhorted to “fight like hell” was clearly intended to put intense pressure on the Senate and on Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate supposedly disputed electoral votes for Joe Biden and refuse to certify Biden as the winner, throwing the entire process into chaos. Whether this chaos could have ultimately enabled Trump to pull off an “autocoup” and stay in office is far from certain. But Trump’s actions show that he believed it might.

Before he stopped cooperating with the January 6 committee, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over voluminous documents showing that there was a lot of talk floating in and around the White House about getting the election results overturned by getting Biden’s electoral votes annulled in states where voter fraud had been supposedly found—despite no one ever being able to produce evidence of it—with help from Republican state legislatures and state officials, as well as members of Congress.

In some cases, it’s not clear to what extent the proposals were taken seriously. But there is no question that these weren’t mere fantasies or idle speculation by weirdos huddled in their basements. We now know, for instance, that Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican from Ohio, was among those texting Meadows about legal theories that would justify Pence discarding “invalid” electoral votes. We have known since September about the infamous memo by conservative lawyer John Eastman outlining such a strategy to declare Trump the winner. Eastman also gave a rousing speech to the mob just before the riot.

So yes, Trump really did want to steal the election by proclaiming that it was stolen from him; he did all he could to sabotage the peaceful transition of power that has been the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries; in the months since his departure from office, he has continued to push the democracy-subverting lie of the “stolen election.”

As Kevin Williamson puts it:

What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military.

What’s more, Williamson notes, this coup effort is “ongoing, with Trump-aligned Republicans working to take over election-management offices and to continue their effort to delegitimize the 2020 election through lies and conspiracy kookery.”

So here’s the question: Given these facts, how are we seriously discussing the possibility of Trump running and winning again in 2024? I’m all for respecting the opinions of fellow Americans, but how can we respect the belief that the guy who blatantly tried to steal an election is fit to be president again? How do you justify that belief as a normal and legitimate political opinion?

For many who hold that belief, or focus their verbal attacks on those who oppose it, the answer is “Russiagate.”

The argument, which I’ve encountered in many places, is twofold. One: The Dems do it too. Sure (so the argument goes), Trump and his supporters tried to disrupt the transition and delegitimize the election results; but so did the Democrats in 2016, when they targeted the opposition candidate—Trump—for politically motivated surveillance, tried to blame his victory on Russia’s election manipulation, and hounded him with investigations. Two: The Dems made them do it. It’s because the Democrats used the “Russia hoax” to subject Trump to a witch-hunt and deployed dirty tricks with impunity that Trump and his supporters are so ready to believe he was robbed (and besides, they want payback).

So let’s revisit Trump/​Russia one more time.

I wrote about Russiagate in March 2019 after the Mueller report came out. I think what I wrote then still holds. No, there wasn’t a criminal conspiracy between Team Trump and Russian agents to subvert the 2016 election. But there is little question that the Kremlin meddled in the election with the goal of hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances. Mainly, this was accomplished by stealing Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails and releasing them via Wikileaks, with a spin falsely implying that the DNC “fixed” the primaries to tank Bernie Sanders. (In fact, the emails used to insinuate that were sent when Clinton was already the presumptive nominee, and while DNC staffers did talk about discrediting Sanders they were strategizing in response to his attacks on the DNC.) To what extent the perception that “Bernie was robbed” may have influenced the vote in some of the key states Clinton lost, no one will ever know.

There is also little question that Team Trump eagerly welcomed Russian help and salivated over the Wikileaks dumps, despite widespread knowledge that these disclosures involved material stolen by Kremlin agents. We know that Trump advisor Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing the investigation (and then pardoned by Trump), tried strenuously to get the stolen emails and regularly briefed the Trump campaign (and almost certainly Trump himself) on the communications he received from his contacts at Wikileaks. We know that on July 31, 2016—shortly after a Wikileaks dump of allegedly compromising Clinton material—Stone and Trump had a phone chat after which Trump said that “more information” was going to be released.

Add to this the fact that the Trump campaign was crawling with people who had shady connections to pro-Kremlin elements in Russia and Ukraine.

Here’s how Jonathan Rauch sums it up in a recent article in Persuasion:

  • Trump’s campaign manager provided internal campaign materials to a business associate characterized by the Senate report and the U.S. Treasury Department as a Russian intelligence operative.

  • The campaign team, including Trump, was well aware of potential plans by Russia’s Wikileaks partner to dump stolen documents, kept close tabs on it, and tried to schedule and exploit that possibility.

  • Trump and his fixer Michael Cohen lied point-blank about Trump’s ongoing business dealings with the Russians.

  • Meanwhile, at no point did Trump and his people report Russia’s activities to U.S. law enforcement; instead, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the campaign was “elated” by what it regarded as a “gift” from Wikileaks.

Eli Lake, who takes a much more critical view of the FBI investigation in Commentary, argues that “when it comes to Russia, Trump was both framed and guilty,” since the FBI relied too much on the now-discredited Steele dossier in pursuing its case and extending surveillance over the Trump campaign. Rauch may be too easy on the FBI, which he portrays as the victim of deceptions associated with the Steele dossier; Lake is correct that there is evidence the Bureau failed to disclose all relevant details about the source of some of the information in surveillance warrant applications. (Whether this corner-cutting was unique to the Trump/​Russia investigation is another matter.) But I think Rauch makes a very strong case—which Lake doesn’t really contradict—that there were solid, intelligence-based reasons to investigate Trump’s Russia connections. It wasn’t a “hoax.” It wasn’t a partisan “witch-hunt.” If Trump was “both framed and guilty,” one may also say that the FBI committed improprieties but investigating these connections was proper and necessary.

(While I don’t want to rehash the entire Trump/​Russia story, I also think Lake gives Trump too much credit for tough policies with regard to Russia despite his verbal lovefest with Vladimir Putin. Some of those policies almost certainly happened in spite of Trump. For example, he was reportedly very reluctant to approve the sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, and then he blocked the weapons transfer to pressure the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. The Trump White House also repeatedly tried to weaken and spike sanctions against the Kremlin, despite strong bipartisan support for such measures in Congress.)

But here is the real heart of the difference between Russiagate and “Stop the Steal”:

There was no serious attempt by any major Democratic players to use Russiagate to derail the transition in 2016.

Yes, there were half a dozen House Democrats (plus a few loud protesters) who tried to object to the certification of Trump’s victory on January 6, 2017. They found no backing from any Senators. Neither Barack Obama (who hosted Trump at the White House as president-elect two days after the 2016 election) nor Hillary Clinton (who called Trump to concede shortly after her defeat was finalized at 2:30 a.m. and gave a gracious concession speech the next morning) gave any support to any effort to stop Trump from becoming president.

“We’re going to let this guy become president and then use the Russia investigation to make his life miserable and undercut his credibility” really doesn’t seem like much of a plan.

Likewise, the notion that the FBI was carrying out an anti-Trump plot on behalf of the Democrats and the “Deep State” during the 2016 campaign ultimately founders on the fact that the FBI investigation was not used to damage Trump before the election. On the contrary: After then-FBI director James Comey’s October 28, 2016 letter to Congress about new emails pertinent to the probe into Clinton’s email server dealt a palpable hit to the Clinton campaign, many of her supporters were frustrated because the FBI wasn’t talking about the Trump investigation. On October 31, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that intelligence agencies saw no “clear link” between Trump and the Kremlin; FBI and intel officials even said that they believed the email hack “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” (Notably, the Mueller investigation eventually came to the opposite conclusion: that the Kremlin operation was intended, “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” to help Trump and undermine Clinton.)

Some plot.

Obviously, Buzzfeed’s publication of the Steele dossier—after the certification of Trump’s victory—was a game-changer as far as media coverage of the Trump/​Russia scandal. Many Democrats did seize on it to question Trump’s legitimacy. Things got to the point where two-thirds of Democrats believed Russia had “definitely” or “probably” tampered with actual vote tallies to hand Trump the victory, even though there is no evidence of such tampering. (It is worth noting that while this belief suggests high levels of conspiratorial thinking, it is not as toxic for democracy as GOP voter fraud claims. The Democratic myth posits a foreign adversary that conducted a big intelligence operation to manipulate the 2016 election went further and changed vote totals; the Republican one posits rampant cheating by Americans, including both officials and voters.

Yet even after the Steele dossier would-be bombshell, there was no effort at the top of the Democratic Party—certainly not from Obama or Clinton—to use this to derail or delay the transition. And while the Russia scandals undoubtedly hurt the Trump presidency, much of that damage was self-inflicted. No conspiracy forced Trump, in May 2017, to tell NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired James Comey because of the “Russia thing”—or, far more shockingly, to brag about the firing to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak during a White House meeting, a conversation in which the president of the United States described the ex-FBI chief as “a real nut job” and suggested that his departure would take off the pressure regarding Russia.

Yes, as Trumpers and anti-antis are fond of pointing out, Clinton did eventually call Trump an “illegitimate president”—nearly three years after the election, in September 2019, when Trump was already facing the Ukraine scandal that led to his first impeachment. It’s hardly the same thing as the scramble by Team Trump to help Trump stay in office after losing the election. It’s not even in the same ballpark.

One can criticize the Democrats, the media, and the FBI for their handling of certain aspects of the Trump/​Russia investigation. One can agree that many progressive commentators took the Trump/​Russia story and ran with it all the way to conspiracy-theory crazyland. But there is no comparison to Trump’s and his minions’ attempted coup and systematic attack on American democracy. Even if we buy the whataboutist logic that two wrongs make a right (or at least an okay), there’s no way “Russiagate” zeroes out Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stay in power after losing reelection. One of these things is not at all like the other.