The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capital has begun the public phase of its hearings and the naysayers — at least all those who don’t work for Fox News or occupy a Republican seat in Congress — are eating a little crow.

The storytelling is more dramatic than the critics thought possible. The new revelations are powerful.

But the big question remains. What exactly is the end game here? I watched the June 9 prime time hearing and a second one the morning of June 13. I’ve been following all the analyses and it’s hard to turn away. The pundits initially focused on the process and personalities involved. New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle titled her piece “Et Tu, Ivanka,” after the president’s daughter took the stand and distanced herself from his election lies.

But what quickly struck most analysts is how prosecutorial the whole thing felt. On that opening night the committee’s chair Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Vice-chair Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, meticulously laid out what sounded like a racketeering case against a Mafia crime boss. In her opening statement, Liz Cheney was blunt: “Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”

Legal experts will tell you a congressional committee can’t actually prosecute the crimes of the former president. That is the domain of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. He has been, to use a word that takes appropriately long to even pronounce, excruciatingly careful about inserting his department in such matters.

But there is something bigger at work here, and it’s important. We’re in uncharted territory with the idea of bringing criminal charges against a former president. The principle that the party elected to govern us doesn’t arrest those it just defeated goes deep into the bedrock of our democracy.

But even deeper in that bedrock is the idea that power belongs to the people, and once the people have spoken that power transfers peacefully to their chosen leader. Donald Trump violated that. He broke our trust. And somewhere along a line that runs from lie to fraud to conspiracy to outright sedition he most likely broke the law. Maybe a lot of laws.

I’ve spent years observing the mass culture and the ways persuasion ripples through it. My take is this is far too big a deal for the criminal justice system to handle alone. The larger purpose of the 1/6 panel hearings is to help recalibrate the nation’s mindset to accommodate the notion of seeing a corrupt former president in handcuffs. Airing the case in the court of public opinion is almost a precondition to getting it brought before an actual jury.

The closest we’ve come to this was when Richard Nixon resigned from office after the Watergate hearings exposed evidence he’d broken the law. His successor Gerald Ford pardoned him to spare the nation the pain of seeing a former president put on trial.

That worked because Nixon had sufficient honor to fade quietly from the scene. We won’t be so lucky this time around. Trump’s delusional 12-page response to the 1/6 committee’s second public hearing pushes The Big Lie of a stolen election as hard as ever, even after we all heard his attorney general say under oath the former president knew it was a load of crap, had been told that numerous times. Now his election-denying surrogates are getting nominated to run in governor, attorney general, and secretary of state races all across the country. As I write this there are reports of a county canvassing board in rural New Mexico refusing to certify a primary election for no other reason than its three hard-right Republican members feel in their hearts something might be up with the voting machines.

A showdown is going to happen, one way or the other. Trump in jail is a painfully obvious step we need to take towards getting our democracy back on track. The groundwork laid by the congressional committee is what we need to see us through it. Just put yourself in Merrick Garland’s shoes and imagine the hell that breaks loose when Trump gets invited into the back of a squad car. Will the officers remember his advice to police during his first days in office? “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over…you can take the hand away, OK?’

So far the work has been disciplined and serious, establishing a clear pattern of criminal behavior. We even learned about a con using a non-existent “Election Defense Fund” to pick $250 million out of the pockets of Trump’s small donors in the last weeks of 2020. He’s still scamming the nation he took an oath to lead. From the first days of Trump’s presidency, I’ve thought it would probably end in something like a Truth and Reconciliation commission. Towards the end, when the polls were indicating we might well succeed in voting him out of office, I wrote that the coming months would be like trying to end a relationship with a dangerous abuser.

Now here we are, still trying to extricate ourselves from the abusive grip of our former president. There’s an old saying that’s been attributed in one form or another to everyone from Machiavelli to a character from the TV series The Wire. “If you’re going to take a shot at the king, don’t miss.”

What the January 6 hearings are really about is an America under continuing threat from its former leader, trying to steady our hand.