There is a tremendous amount of terrific journalistic work being done documenting Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to destroy democracy and his party’s eager acquiescence in them. But there’s still a great deal of both-sidesing going on in coverage of our national effort to reckon with the legacy of Jan. 6.

So here’s an effort to imagine what such both-sides coverage would look like if Trump were to succeed in overturning the 2024 election via means similar to what he attempted in 2020.

It goes without saying that this scenario is highly unlikely. But the point of this exercise is to probe just how much more it would take to break us out of some of these both-sidesing conventions.

Some of the devices parodied here continue to be widespread, as links in this piece to real examples demonstrate. What follows is a fictional article.

A year later, Trump’s election reversal drives a partisan wedge

Jan. 6, 2026

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WASHINGTON — One year after the searing events that culminated in Donald Trump’s dramatic recapture of the presidency after a bitterly contested 2024 election, the nation continues to inhabit two separate red and blue realities about what happened, and remains divided into irreconcilable camps.

Twelve months to the day after street violence broke out at the Capitol as the GOP-controlled Congress voted to invalidate Vice President Kamala Harris’s electors from Pennsylvania, resulting in a protracted dispute that ended with the Supreme Court declining to hear the case, Democrats and Republicans cannot even agree on the most basic facts about what transpired.

The result is that the reversed 2024 election has become just another wedge in a divided nation that remains more polarized than ever. Though Democrats continue to say Harris won Pennsylvania, and some experts agree, polls have shown most Republicans continue to believe that Harris didn’t legitimately win the 2024 election and subsequently tried to steal it.

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The tribal divisions about the election mirror what happened in the wake of the disputed 2020 election. After the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Democrats created a select committee to examine the attack and the effort to reverse the election that preceded it.

But Democrats on the committee arguably handed Republicans a political gift by refusing to appoint pro-Trump firebrands, which caused it to devolve into a partisan feud. Republicans called the committee’s investigation “illegitimate.”

After the committee released its determination that Trump and his allies had attempted a concerted, deliberate effort to overturn the election through procedural means and then violence, the findings exploded into a partisan battle and it resulted in a failure by Washington to act.

Trump then mounted his 2024 comeback, and prevailed over Harris after a bitter dispute over the results in Pennsylvania. Though Harris appeared to win the popular vote by less than half a percentage point, the GOP-controlled legislature tried to appoint a slate of electors for Trump. This was thwarted when Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro appointed a slate for Harris.

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But on Jan. 6, 2025 Republicans in the GOP-controlled House and Senate, united in the belief that there had been widespread fraud in Pennsylvania, voted to object to Harris’s electors, and declared Trump the winner of the electoral count vote. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, with five conservative justices declaring this a political question.

Elections experts point out that if the Electoral Count Act of 1887 had been revised to make it much harder for Congress to object to electors, such a scenario would likely have been averted.

In 2022, Democrats urged Republicans to join them in passing such a reform and a host of other protections for democracy. But Republicans accused Democrats of manufacturing evidence that GOP state legislatures were engaged in anti-democratic activities, and criticized the Democrats for seeking “unprecedented partisan power to micromanage elections across America.”

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Democrats tried to suspend the filibuster to revise the Electoral Count Act and pass democracy protections. But Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) refused to go along, claiming that ending the filibuster and passing “partisan voting legislation” would “destroy” our democracy.

Democrats worked hard to move Manchin. But angry progressive attacks did not move the West Virginia senator, they only emboldened him. Manchin’s steadfast defense of bipartisanship has served him well in a deep red state, and he ultimately prevailed.

All the events that followed continue to be interpreted through a partisan lens. Democrats say that if their warnings had been heeded and their reform blueprint followed, none of this might have happened.

But Republicans say Democrats refuse to move on. Commenting on the first anniversary of the crisis, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) decried the violence, and then pivoted to blaming Democrats, claiming they are “using it as a partisan political weapon to further divide our country.”

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One year later, relations in Congress have remained poisonous, with calls for a full accounting of what happened devolving into a series of partisan battles. The nation’s lawmakers remain strikingly at odds about how to unify a torn nation.

One Republican senator said he has no plans to acknowledge the significance of the anniversary.

“This thing has already become way too politicized,” he said, “and that would just further exacerbate it.”

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