It’s been three years now since Donald Trump’s attempted coup at the United States Capitol—an insurrection in which America, as President Joe Biden observed in a somber address Friday, nearly “lost it all.” But Trump, who is running on an even more explicitly authoritarian agenda this time around, is ramping up his efforts to rewrite the history of that day—casting the attack as peaceful and patriotic and the convicted insurrectionists as “hostages.” “They’ve suffered enough,” Trump said at a rally in Clinton, Iowa on Saturday. 

As is usually the case with Trump, his remarks on January 6 were mostly self-pitying and rambling. But to the extent there was strategic thinking behind his comments, the goal was clear: to flood the zone with shit and neutralize Biden’s efforts to remind Americans of the threat Trump poses to democracy. “If you can bring it to a draw,” as a Trump adviser told NBC News of the democracy argument, “it’s a win.”

It’s a profoundly cynical ploy. But the political media has taken the bait, adopting a “both sides” framing at times and giving only limited pushback on Trump allies like Elise Stefanik and Mike Johnson spouting his talking points about “January 6 hostages” and baseless claims that election laws were “violated” in 2020. “That’s just a fact,” Johnson, a leading election denier now serving as House speaker, told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan Sunday of unfounded voting irregularities he suggested led to Biden’s victory.

Needless to say, the rigged election claims from Trump and his supporters are right-wing fantasy—not facts. But America’s political memory can be short, and there is a risk that the immediacy of the January 6 attack can fade in the three years since. Biden, Democrats, and other Trump critics have sought not only to keep the memory of January 6 fresh but to make clear the anti-democratic threat has, in some ways, grown rather than abated. “You don’t have to take my word for the fact that you can’t count on these elected Republicans to defend the Constitution,” Liz Cheney told Brennan of her former colleagues on Sunday. “Every time they go out and give an interview, they demonstrate it themselves.”

The challenge for those who want democracy to prevail is ensuring those alarms cut through all the noise Trump makes on the campaign trail. “Trump is trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election,” Biden warned Friday. “But we knew the truth because we saw it with our own eyes.”