These details, if they bear out, are valuable—but they are details. The main facts of what happened on January 6—that Trump whipped up a political frenzy in his efforts to overturn the election, that his supporters broke into the Capitol after a speech in which he promised to “stop the steal,” and that the president declined for hours to tell them to stop—happened in plain sight. This doesn’t mean there is nothing left to discover: Among other things, there are serious questions to be answered about the range of institutional failures, from the Capitol Police to the FBI and the Pentagon, that enabled the attack. But if the public’s expectation is that the January 6 committee will be able to tell a substantially new and even more damning story about the attack, Americans may be setting themselves up for disappointment.

Central to this dynamic is the fact that the Republican Party refuses to hold Trump to account. It’s tempting to imagine that there must be something the January 6 committee could reveal that would turn the party against him. But January 6 itself was that something, at least initially: Though it’s strange to remember now, Republican leaders initially excoriated Trump for his role in the violence, before revising their version of events to align with his defense of the insurrectionists.

So whatever the committee finds, it’s hard to see it substantially altering the political landscape. A true reckoning, a full repudiation by Republicans as well as Democrats of Trump and of the ugly ideology that fermented the riot, will remain elusive. This is frustrating—not to mention profoundly unjust—but it’s not cause to write off the work of the January 6 committee. Rather, it’s a reason to maintain realistic expectations for what the committee can achieve in the time that remains. The post-Mueller slump of disappointment pushed Trump opponents into political stasis as they struggled to respond to the special counsel’s findings. With the midterm elections coming up, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans can’t afford dithering like that again.