A month after the January 6 insurrection, a page appeared on the Justice Department’s website naming the defendants charged for their alleged role in the Capitol riot. The list remained in place over the next four years, ballooning as the department brought charges against hundreds of people. Then, shortly after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, it vanished.

Trump has seized on his reelection as an opportunity to rewrite the story of January 6. Just hours after he assumed the presidency, he granted pardons and commutations to the insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, calling their prosecutions a “grave national injustice.” The deletion of the Justice Department’s page on January 6 is a triumph for the insurrectionists whose crimes were erased, and for Republicans more generally, many of whom would simply rather not talk about the late unpleasantness.

But in the long term, the truth of what happened will prove difficult to bury. The roughly six hours during which rioters breached the Capitol are some of the most exhaustively documented in recent history, thanks to the many participants who filmed themselves in action and the investigative efforts of both the Justice Department and the House January 6 committee. Even Trump can’t wipe that away.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

Trump’s proclamation announcing the January 6 pardons portrays the grant of clemency as the beginning of a “process of national reconciliation,” a parody of the typical language of presidential mercy. He has demanded that the Justice Department drop all ongoing investigations into rioters not yet charged and placed the office that had carried out those prosecutions under the control of Ed Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer who himself tweeted that he was at the Capitol the day of the insurrection. Days into Trump’s second term, when the president attended a rally in Las Vegas, standing behind him was Stewart Rhodes—the leader of the Oath Keepers and a prominent presence on January 6, who had just received a commutation of his 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy.

In this upside-down version of January 6, the prosecutions were the crime, not the coup attempt. And, despite Trump’s smug assertion of “reconciliation,” his administration is now retaliating against the civil servants who played a role in prosecuting the insurrectionists. The Justice Department has fired 15 low-level prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases, along with officials assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of Trump. Thousands of FBI employees who worked on the January 6 investigations—by many metrics, the largest investigative effort in the bureau’s history—are also waiting to discover whether they, too, will be purged.

The disappearance of the Justice Department’s page on the insurrection, which had expanded to include not just information on defendants and charges but also a growing list of convictions and criminal sentences, was a particularly blunt metaphor for this erasure of history. On January 27, the page was replaced with a “Page not found” message. “This is a huge victory for J6ers,” Brandon Straka, a pro-Trump social-media influencer who himself received a pardon for his role on January 6, wrote on X. “This site was one of countless weapons of harassment used by the federal government to make life impossible for its targets from J6.”

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

This is the politics of forgetting, and the United States is no stranger to it. David Blight, an American-history professor at Yale, has argued that January 6 is a novel twist on the “Lost Cause”—the Confederate narrative of noble sacrifice that fueled successful white resistance to multiracial democracy in the years after the Civil War. The original Lost Cause strengthened into a racist political force over decades. When I reached out to Blight to discuss the comparison, he seemed unnerved by how quickly the memory of January 6 had shifted toward revisionism. “We’re in an unusual moment where evidence doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he told me. “It’s in that world that January 6 is being processed as a historical marker.”

But that evidence does still exist. And among the dissenters to this enforced forgetting are the people who have spent the most time reviewing it: the judges. Trump’s actions “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote, reluctantly acknowledging that she had no ability to block the Justice Department from tossing out a January 6 defendant’s case. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.”

And it will be preserved, because those documents are not under the control of the Trump administration. PACER, the public system used by the federal courts to file legal documents, is run by the judicial branch. There is no mechanism through which a vengeful president can bar access to the thousands upon thousands of pages of court filings docketed in the hundreds and hundreds of charged January 6 cases—including the case against Trump. Days after the Justice Department deleted the database of rioters from its website, one judge in a January 6 case used his order dismissing the charges to memorialize the same resource that the department had scrubbed, attaching the almost 140-page spreadsheet as an appendix. That material is all publicly available, and it is not going away, whatever Trump says about injustice or reconciliation.

The same is true of the House January 6 committee’s work—the hours of hearings convened and broadcast as well as the nearly 900-page final report and its extensive compilation of evidence and depositions. It’s all freely accessible on the website of the Government Publishing Office, a legislative agency, and easily downloaded by anyone who wants to keep ahold of it. Outside the government, ProPublica retains an extensive database of videos posted to the defunct social-media platform Parler by rioters on January 6, documenting the siege of the Capitol minute by minute. NPR hosts a database of defendants that reproduces the information the Justice Department tried to delete.

There are more guerrilla-style efforts at archiving, too. As the NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly has documented, the January 6 investigation was shaped by the volunteer efforts of ordinary people who mobilized online to sort through video and social-media posts and send tips to the FBI. Now some of that same energy has turned toward preserving the record. I spoke with one person who participated in those early crowdsourcing projects and is now maintaining a network of bare-bones websites where visitors can access a range of January 6 material, including court documents and videos posted on social media. Another collective is working to save video evidence on Archive.org and download the full spread of court documents. At the time I reached out, this group estimated that about 50,000 pages had been preserved this way so far.

[Read: The January 6er who left Trumpism]

Struggles over historical memory are ultimately “about the power of the story and who gets to control it,” Blight told me, rather than the strength of the facts. And for those who were attacked or threatened on January 6, or who have faced attacks since for their efforts to uncover what happened and bring the perpetrators to justice, the sudden revision of the story without regard for facts has done its own damage. “I get so many messages, ‘Harry, you’re a hero.’ I don’t want to be a hero,” Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who protected Congress on January 6, told The New York Times. “I want accountability.”

Still, the existence of a robust historical record can eventually make a difference. Blight pointed to the white-supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, the true violence of which was ignored for nearly a century until scholars began looking through the archive and publishing their findings. Today, it is widely recognized for what it was: a successful assault on multiracial democracy, carried out by a violent mob.

“You can almost predict that with that kind of evidence, as long as it’s not suppressed or destroyed,” historians will one day be able to tell the truth of what happened, Blight said. As the canard goes, history may be written by the victors. But in the long term—perhaps the very long term—it is also written by the people who kept the documents.

Hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump began targeting migrants seeking refuge or asylum. He brought the entire refugee system to a halt, preventing the resettlement of tens of thousands of already screened refugees and stopping the admission of thousands of Afghan refugees. He also ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, “leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo,” according to ProPublica.

But there’s one group of “refugees” Trump is ready to welcome.

I bet you can guess.

Last week Trump signed an executive order stating that his administration would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” Many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world are fleeing state-related persecution and would love to come to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of them are already here, working and contributing to their communities. Some of them have already been victims of vicious slander from Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance. The Trump administration has closed its door to all of them, except for one white ethnic group in South Africa.

Land reform is a complicated issue in South Africa. Since the 1994 end of apartheid—a system of forced racial separation and domination that granted full rights only to South Africa’s white minority while categorizing nonwhite South Africans as inferior—racial inequality in South Africa has barely budged. The 7 percent of the South African population that is white remains much wealthier than the rest of the population. Black South Africans own only 4 percent of the land while white South Africans own about three-quarters, a consequence of the apartheid government’s half-century-long practice of forcibly seizing land from Black South Africans and displacing millions into “homelands” used to maintain the fiction of a white South African majority. Laws also prevented Black South Africans from owning land outside the cramped territory allotted to them.

Last month, South Africa passed a law that allows the expropriation of land if it is unused or the public has a need for it. In some cases, it would allow the government to do so without compensating the owners. Afriforum, an Afrikaner group, called the government’s policy “irresponsible.” But the South African government insists that it is not seeking large-scale expropriation. Its foreign minister compared the policy to eminent-domain laws in the United States. Neighbouring Zimbabwe, whose government confiscated much of its white farmers’ land, has suffered from dire economic consequences, and South Africa clearly isn’t interested in redistributing wealth in a way that collapses the economy. A coalition of organizations representing white South Africans stated categorically that their members are not interested in Trump’s offer: “We may disagree with the ANC, but we love our country.”

Trump’s executive order also stopped aid to South Africa, which was already dealing with the devastating aftermath of the USAID freeze. The order may, in part, have been the result of the influence of his wealthy donors, who include far-right billionaires with roots in South Africa, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. But the idea that white South African farmers have been targets of state oppression and ethnic violence has been a cause célèbre on the American right for a while now.

It was a focus of Tucker Carlson’s now-defunct Fox News program, where he claimed that land reforms meant to address apartheid-era injustices were the “definition of racism.” (He also complained about efforts to address discrimination against Black farmers, which is apparently fine.) Carlson’s coverage led Trump, the last time he was in office, to order then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into “farm seizures” and already disproved reports of “large scale killings” of white farmers. Experts on the topic dismissed these inflammatory allegations as white-nationalist propaganda; one former ambassador to South Africa called Trump’s rhetoric “dangerous and poisoned” and accused him of spreading “a white-supremacist meme from the darkest place he can find.”

Violence against white people in South Africa is certainly not unheard of—the country’s murder rate is very high. But white South Africans, including farmers, are much less likely to be murdered than Black South Africans. Living standards for white South Africans also remain very high, with only 1 percent in poverty, compared with 64 percent of Black South Africans.

Whether or not any white South Africans take Trump up on his offer to come to the United States, the offer itself tells us a great deal about the Trump administration.

Even if one accepted the idea that white South Africans were being persecuted, and that as a result they deserved special dispensation as refugees, it does not follow that they are the only people in the world who do. The Trump administration has withdrawn protections from people fleeing leftist regimes in places such as Venezuela and Cuba, as well as from people fleeing right-wing ones in places like Afghanistan. It has stated that its policy is to accept as few refugees as possible. It then chose to roll out the red carpet for one particular set of white people. That, itself, is functionally an apartheid immigration policy: One set of lenient rules for white people, and another merciless set for everyone else.

The Trump administration insists that it wants to “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based,” but this immigration policy shows that is obviously false. When the administration says decisions are “color-blind and merit-based,” it most likely means We see you as white, and therefore worthy. And that is a sweeping ideological worldview, not a narrow rubric that can be confined to immigration.

In the early 1500s, an unknown wealthy patron is said to have commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to produce the Salvator Mundi, a striking ecclesiastical masterpiece in which Jesus is shown blessing humanity with his right hand while holding an orb representing the Earth in his left. The patron’s identity has been lost to history, and whether da Vinci actually painted it is still debated among scholars, but such commissions were common during the medieval and Renaissance periods: Medici-like benefactors, uncomfortable with the potential sinfulness of their extravagant wealth, sought to offset their guilt and enhance their prestige by sponsoring magnificent works of art and architecture for the public to enjoy.

Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi changed hands countless times through the ensuing centuries. Mistaken as a comparatively commonplace artwork, it was owned by a 17th-century heir to the Scottish crown who was later beheaded, passed to the illegitimate son of an 18th-century duke, and then languished in obscurity for more than a century. An unknown buyer acquired the painting at auction for £45, or about $1,300 today, and it ended up in Houston. The painting later passed to Basil Clovis Hendry Sr., who ran a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sheet-metal company. Then, in 2005, on suspicion that there was more to the painting than met the untrained eye, an art consortium bought the painting for just over $1,000. Years of restoration, cleaning, research, and speculation yielded a shocking announcement: The painting was Da Vinci’s lost Salvator Mundi.

What happened to the tableau after that is a good illustration of just how little today’s superrich resemble the public-spirited patrons of the past. Yves Bouvier, an art dealer who is currently accused of evading $800 million in taxes, bought the work for $83 million, then sold it the following day for nearly $50 million more to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch and superyacht enthusiast who, according to the leaked Panama Papers, set up a shell company to hide artwork assets from his ex-wife during divorce proceedings. Finally, in a 2017 auction at Christie’s, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used a little-known proxy to purchase the Salvator Mundi for $450.3 million, the highest price paid for a single artwork in history.

In 2021, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the priceless painting had been kept on private display aboard bin Salman’s superyacht, Serene, a 439-foot-long, half-billion-dollar boat that had recently run aground in a navigational accident. A fragile, irreplaceable object of significance to the shared cultural history of all humanity was being kept in a hot, humid environment for the private enjoyment of one royal billionaire and his ultrarich guests. (In another room, Serene was also equipped with state-of-the-art snow machines that could produce four-inch-deep flurries on demand.)

The journey of one painting charts a profound shift in modern societies. The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

In 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton observed that “the poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

Chesterton’s observation was astute for the modern era, but for much of Western history, it was only half true. In his 2023 book, As Gods Among Men, the economic historian Guido Alfani chronicles the role of the ultra-wealthy from antiquity to the era of cryptocurrency. The superrich have always wielded inordinate economic and social power and, as such, have plenty of historical ills to answer for. But the affluent of many past periods also invested in the shared betterment of society, understanding that doing so helped justify the existence of wealth inequality. Today’s ultrarich, by Alfani’s telling, are uniquely selfish, and by abdicating the philanthropic role, they are “fuelling resentment and leaving their place in society uncertain.”

The social contract that imposed certain civic responsibilities on the rich emerged after the Black Death decimated nearly half the population of medieval Europe. The dominant Christian theology of the Middle Ages held that wealth was inherently sinful in a world where most people toiled in terrible poverty. But as the continent recovered from the plague, a new, pragmatic arrangement emerged. The surviving wealthy would be expected to use their wealth to provide public goods. This echoed the norms of antiquity; the historian Paul Veyne has noted that in ancient Rome, for example, the belief was widespread that any defects in civic life directly reflected on the virtues of the city’s elite.

[Read: Cancel billionaires]

The barons of medieval society would serve two important functions, Alfani recounts: “making the city splendid in everybody’s interest by means of their ‘magnificence’ and acting as private reserves of financial resources into which the community could tap in times of crisis by means of taxation or of extraordinary contributions.” In other words, wealth inequality was tolerated because it provided a useful social function. The wealthy were expected to spend lavish sums on transforming cities by building shared public spaces. They were also meant to come to the rescue with their largesse in the case of a public crisis or calamity. Cosimo de’ Medici did precisely that, saving Florence from bankruptcy in 1434.

Benefactors did not necessarily serve these functions out of uncomplicated generosity. From their “magnificence” they could expect personal glory, political favor, and perhaps a pathway to eternal salvation. The savvy used patronage to expand, not drain, their wealth. Some patrons participated in history’s great crimes, from the Crusades to the slave trade. Nonetheless, as Alfani convincingly argues, even the most self-interested and amoral among them often wound up doing some good.

The 15th-century archbishop of Florence called this norm the “public theology of magnificence.” But it also required enforcement. When the rich refused to fulfill their social obligations, governments imposed taxes, extraordinary war levies, or, in the case of 16th- and 17th-century Spain, mandatory loans (called secuestros). The wealthy were not allowed to simply hoard their wealth, park it in an offshore haven, and escape catastrophe by sailing away from a collapsing society on a superyacht.

Even in Gilded Age America, with all its injustices, and where the pursuit of wealth was hardly condemned as sin, society’s richest members were expected to use their riches to benefit the public in times of crisis. J. P. Morgan bailed the United States out in 1907, acting as a banker of last resort. A decade later, the U.S. government pressed financiers and tycoons to invest in Liberty Bonds for World War I, a bad bet that worsened their financial positions considerably. During World War II, the top American marginal tax rate reached an eye-popping 94 percent.

Over time, however, the norms eroded. An ethos of what historians call “munificence,” a belief that the rich should be generous, but only if they wish, replaced the theology of obligatory magnificence. This subtle difference had profound implications: Patronage and public benefit were no longer assumed to be duties, but bonuses that wealthy individuals could provide out of the goodness of their hearts. The coronavirus pandemic ushered in even more grotesque inequality. Elon Musk’s net worth surpassed $400 billion. The world’s economies ground to a halt, and public coffers were crushed with debt, but superyacht sales surged by 46 percent. The public, especially the poor, suffered; the rich, like those of G. K. Chesterton’s caricature, escaped.

During the early coronavirus lockdowns, the billionaire media mogul David Geffen hunkered down on his 454-foot-long superyacht, Rising Sun, which included a private basketball court and wine cellar among its 82 rooms. He posted a stunning photo of a Caribbean sunset to Instagram at the height of the pandemic, with the caption “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I hope everybody is staying safe.”

[Read: A yacht owner’s worst nightmare]

What people spend their money on, beyond hard-nosed investments, sends a social signal. For example, the drivers of Priuses and Cybertrucks are sending rather different signals, as their visible purchases likely reflect different underlying behaviors and beliefs. At the extremes, the wealthy may go to great lengths to display their affluence. For example, in potlatch ceremonies among Indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest, individuals showcase their riches by engaging in the ritualized destruction of expensive objects.

In The Patron’s Payoff, Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser argue that historical patronage was a form of pragmatic signaling, conveying virtues such as religious devotion and civic duty. But it also provided benefits to the wealthy, who became part of an elite club and were able to use their patronage for personal glory and social advancement. Today the signaling of wealth has shifted from public-facing duties to efforts to provoke private envy.

When the Saudi crown prince pays half a billion dollars for an invaluable artwork and then displays it for ultrarich elites on his private superyacht, he is engaging in a form of signaling, but not one aimed at the public. Instead, the “haves” and “have yachts” play a status game only for the benefit of the rich themselves. Cathedrals were beautifying public icons that often served the poor; yachts are designed to hide their splendors from the prying eyes of the riffraff. One of the great wealthy villains of modernity, Martin Shkreli, didn’t just buy a coveted piece of cultural heritage—the notorious Wu-Tang Clan album—for his own private consumption. He said he would destroy it, potlatch-style. This kind of signaling is a far cry from the one that centered on civic virtue and religious devotion.

The U.S. government has facilitated the ultrarich in their abdication of social responsibility. For example, Charles B. Johnson—the former CEO of Franklin Templeton Investments, a Republican megadonor, and a part owner of the San Francisco Giants—purchased the opulent Carolands chateau, a 46,000-square-foot Gilded Age estate with 98 rooms. According to a ProPublica investigation, Johnson received a $38 million tax break because he pledged to turn Carolands into a museum open to the public 40 hours a week. He didn’t keep that promise—Carolands allows small tours only on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.—but he got the tax break all the same.

Some among the American ultrarich openly deride philanthropy as an ineffective use of money. The tech mogul Marc Andreessen has argued that charitable giving is less useful than investing in tech companies, because “technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic.” (One in 12 people globally lives in extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2.15 a day; it’s hard to imagine how they have benefited more from Ning, Andreessen’s social-media platform, than they would from, say, food and medicine.) The billionaires Larry Page and Peter Thiel have expressed similar views. Thiel concentrates his philanthropy on what he designates to be breakthrough technology. He has donated to the Seasteading Institute, which says it is “reimagining civilization with floating communities” and “significant political autonomy”—as though the superyachts and offshore tax havens aren’t enough. Why not live offshore, bobbing in a libertarian commune free from burdensome social obligations, such as taxes?

[Read: Space billionaires, please read the room]

Some billionaires have maintained the notion of magnificence by pouring money into solutions to social problems, such as treatments for malaria or children’s hospitals. The Gates Foundation, for example, has made tremendous progress against scourges of public health. But by and large, the notion that wealthy individuals will marshal their resources to alleviate social crises has come to seem quaint in today’s world. In 2008, President Barack Obama proposed that the income of private-equity-fund managers be treated as ordinary personal income rather than capital gains—and ran afoul of the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, who later compared the president’s proposed tax-policy changes to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Evading social responsibility, even during crises, carries risks for the ultrawealthy. Their opulence compared with the standard of living of their co-citizens becomes harder to justify, and widespread resentment, seemingly inevitable. Some appear to understand that such inequality is unsustainable, but that hasn’t inspired them to become keepers of social wealth for times of shared crisis. Rather, if society collapses, billionaires may just escape onto the waves. A select few are making their contingency plans in rocket ships—as though no longer seeking favor with God but hoping to abscond to the heavens just the same.