“The fact that it wasn’t a game-changing moment is pretty remarkable,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University presidential historian, said. “It’s historically pretty hard to believe.”

Less than a year after the attack, a poll showed more than half of Republican voters opposed continuing to identify and prosecute the people who carried it out. The few Republicans politicians who criticized Trump and his allies immediately after the riot have mostly remained silent. Some have decided to retire from Congress…

Explanations for the shift in attitudes range from the political re-alignment of the major parties, deep-seated cultural divisions to a newly balkanized news media. And voters who already endured a second impeachment of Trump over the insurrection are preoccupied with other matters…

Instead, ambitious Republican politicians travel to Mar-a-Lago to compete for Trump’s blessing while the two GOP members of Congress who joined the investigative panel are ostracized. A Republican National Committee resolution earlier this year characterized the events on Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.” Only two Republicans showed up at a Capitol event marking the riot’s one-year anniversary: Representative Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.