Will those for whom Hutchinson’s testimony was so carefully designed even listen? Will any of the 35 percent change their position? At least a few of the early signs are positive: Some media outlets that the 35 percent are likely to watch, including Fox News, are willing to show and discuss the hearings. One polling company has already shown that three in five Americans have heard about the investigation and that majorities support the investigation and oppose the actions of Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol.

But what really matters, in the longer term, is whether the remaining two in five eventually learn about the hearings and decide to watch them, and whether the one in five surveyed Americans who believe that Trump’s coup d’état was justified change their minds. The committee is making the most elaborate, careful and nuanced attempt to reach those Americans that anyone has yet designed. The presentation will be studied, and copied, for a long time.

Aside from everything else, it seeks to restore a common framework for generating knowledge—that is, a network of people and institutions and fact-checking mechanisms whose overall story should resist even the attempts to cast doubt on one or another witness. Should, of course, is the operative word here. The Trump family, and Trump’s supporters, will indeed try to pick apart the committee’s work, to break up the narrative, to criticize one line in someone’s testimony, to describe the whole effort as biased or unfair. They have already smeared Hutchinson, and won’t stop there. But if the committee’s guess is right, it won’t be a single person’s testimony that matters—not Ivanka Trump’s, not Hutchinson’s—but rather the combined weight of dozens of witnesses. These accounts will at least make it difficult for anyone to defend Trump’s behavior on that day, and in the days that followed. Those who aren’t convinced by this testimony never will be.