These matters are of great consequence to the people in and around the Trump vortex after the election, but they shouldn’t matter to the average Republican. The complication is that Trump has created and bolstered so many GOP candidates who believe, or pretend to believe, that the election was stolen that there is now a large contingent associated with this poisonous view. This, too, is a disservice to the party.

If Trump is the Republican candidate again in 2024, even in the unlikely event that he wanted to memory hole Jan. 6 and never talk about it again, it wouldn’t happen. The Democrats would bring it up unrelentingly and seek as much as possible to make the election a referendum on Trump’s conduct during the most disgraceful period of his presidency. Perhaps it wouldn’t work, but why would Republicans want to risk it or even deal with the complication?

Again, this is a vulnerability unique to Trump. No other prospective 2024 candidate would have to excuse Jan. 6 and parrot the most outlandish claims about the 2020 election, not Ron DeSantis, not Mike Pence, not Tom Cotton, not Nikki Haley. If none of these candidates would sound like Liz Cheney, they wouldn’t be inextricably linked to bonkers events four years prior, either.