Column: Why’s it so hard to do the right thing and honor the true heroes of Jan. 6?

On Monday, Donald Trump will visit the scene of a crime, laying his hand on a Bible and vowing to preserve and protect the Constitution as he swears a formal oath to become the nation’s 47th president.

The bloodstains of the Jan. 6 insurrection have long ago washed away. The shattered windows of the Capitol are mended, the broken doors replaced. You’d never know the terrible mayhem that was visited on the seat of our national government, or the way our country and democracy were defiled that pitch-black day.

Which is exactly how some would like it.

Trump and his acolytes have spent years rewriting history and burying the uncomfortable truth — the lies about a stolen 2020 election, the violent attempt to overturn the result — beneath a reeking blanket of deception, misinformation and falsity.

The attempted cover-up is so total it extends even to the physical premises, where House Speaker Mike Johnson has single-handedly thwarted legislation calling for installation of a plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who battled pro-Trump rioters to protect the Capitol and its inhabitants — including one Mike Johnson.

Disgraceful doesn’t even begin to describe the affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

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“What they went through was just horrendous,” California Rep. Zoe Lofgren said of the men and women who threw their bodies into the breach to protect lawmakers, staff members and reporters covering Congress. “Honestly, they saved us. They saved my life and they saved democracy.”

Trump has said he plans to pardon some of the rioters soon after lifting his hand from the Bible and assuming office. In his up-is-down, ignorance-is-strength mindset, those lawbreakers are the actual victims of the violent assault on our country and its foundational principles.

So it’s worth remembering how on that “day of love,” as Trump has described it, police were set upon by thugs wielding baseball bats, flagpoles, tasers, pepper spray and iron pipes. More than 140 officers were injured. Several died in the aftermath.

The “normal tourist visit,” as one Republican House member described the incursion on the Capitol, caused about $3 million in damage and resulted in criminal charges against more than 1,500 people.

Try behaving that way at Disneyland.

A spending bill passed and signed into law in March 2022 required the creation of the commemorative plaque and its placement on the West Front of the Capitol, where some of the worst violence took place, within a year’s time. Lofgren, a San José Democrat who served on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat, led the House Administration Committee when the law was enacted.

After more than two years of inaction, she sent Johnson “a polite letter” noting the deadline had long passed and asking the reason for the delay. “I look forward to any information you can share to that end and what is being done to address it,” Lofgren wrote.

To this day, she’s never heard back from the speaker. “Crickets,” Lofgren said in an interview.

Last week, dozens of lawmakers — all Democrats — co-signed yet another letter to Johnson, again urging action and requesting a timeline for his follow-through.

“I haven’t even looked at that,” he wanly told reporters when asked about the plaque. “I need to check on that.”

The speaker, who owes his tenuous hold on the job entirely to Trump, appears to be the sole impediment to the memorial’s rightful installment. The Democratic House and Senate leaders both signed off, as did then-Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has since vacated his leadership post and is expected to retire rather then seek reelection to his Senate seat next year.

Johnson’s motive is as obvious as the Capitol dome set against a blue sky: he’s kowtowing to Trump, lest he damage his eggshell ego or prick the incoming president’s gossamer-thin skin.

Michael Fanone, a former Metropolitan Police officer who was injured during the Jan. 6 attack, put it bluntly. The heinous events of that day are “so politically inconvenient” that Johnson and fellow Republicans are “willing to basically take a s— on their own Capitol Police Department and the other agencies that responded to assist them,” he told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.

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Why should anyone care? Washington is chock-full of statues, markers, memorials and plaques that, with a few notable exceptions, are easily passed on a daily basis with scarcely a glance.

“Imagine how you would feel if your police officer son died as a result of the attack and you’ve got people who he was protecting saying it was just a ‘peaceful protest,’ ” Lofgren said. “How would that make you feel? To have some recognition of the sacrifice is meaningful to some of these officers, and therefore it’s meaningful to me.”

Beyond that, it’s important not to whitewash history simply because it makes some people squirm or undermines a party’s political agenda.

Erasure is a step toward forgetting. Forgetting is a step toward nullification. Nullification is a step toward repeating a despicable event.

“On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021,” the memorial tablet reads below a rendering of the U.S. Capitol. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.”

Nor should it be.