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In advance of Mr. Trumps New York indictment, his former adviser Roger Stone reminded people to keep their protests civil and legal. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would be pointing at people to be arrested if theyre being violent. Many (but not all) of the Trump-backed candidates who lost in November conceded their elections within a normal time frame. This was good for the country, but also a bit of a puzzle: Many of these people claimed a major election was stolen, so why wouldnt they do the same for their own? The drag and scrutiny in the aftermath of Jan. 6 might be an answer.

Deterrence is an uneasy goal, however hard to measure, impossible to predict, and at danger of becoming retribution in the wrong hands, or even hardening reactionary and illiberal elements by accident.

Deterrence would also suggest an established kind of consensus: that a specific crime was, in fact, committed and the goal moving forward is to keep other crimes like it from being perpetrated. With many entry points to the problem, and without a shared consensus about what the real problem with the Trump era was, satisfaction here might be difficult to achieve. Theres also a kind of dark-night-of-the-soul, The Godfather Part II concern, which surfaced in early polling after the New York indictment, that at least some segment of the country most likely finds that prosecution to be political, and doesnt seem to mind. And Mr. Trump is raising a lot of money and consolidating his polling advantage in the wake of the first indictment.

Consensus and order are unusual, though. Ms. Lofgren noted that the Jan. 6 committee was different from any experience shed had, beginning with its unique presentation structure. You had to have a unified view of what was the mission, and the mission was to find all the facts that we could, and then tell them, she said. There wasnt a political divide on that. But that doesnt mean we saw everything exactly the same way, exactly at the same time. The committee, she explained, used closed-door discussions to reach public unity: There were times when I thought one thing and by the time wed spent a couple of hours thinking through it, I became convinced of someone elses point of view. And the same thing happened with other members. Thats also rare.

Reaching one shared idea of what happened and why things went wrong, even within a smaller group behind closed doors, has real appeal, even if its not how we would want a country run. Instead, its like the best society can do is to keep applying a kind of societal weight to Mr. Trump attention on the accurate memory of the events, the creation of legal hurdles and public scrutiny, possibly doomed prosecutions of varying quality adding a little more weight, a little more weight, a little more weight in an effort to contain him. Its like some mixed-up version of deterrence and truth, with a society trying something, anything, with possibly volatile precedents for the future.

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Opinion | Donald Trump May Have Begun Losing - The New York Times