Where does the Jan. 6 inquiry go from here?

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Through 15 months of investigations, hundreds of interviews and nine televised proceedings, the committee examining the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, has grappled with some of the most divisive and vital questions that have faced the United States since the Civil War era.

With its likely last public session complete, one question lingered, its answer as elusive and yet as urgent and perplexing as any in modern American history: Where does this inquiry go from here?

That question became even more vital after Thursday’s session, which issued a subpoena to Donald Trump to appear before the committee.

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Jan. 6 panel votes to subpoena Trump

“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, Donald Trump,” GOP Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, co-chair of the committee, said during the session in the Cannon Caucus Room. “None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of this.”

The former president is unlikely to agree to appear despite the view of the chairman of the committee, representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, that “he is required to answer for his actions.” Though several presidents – including Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and John Tyler – have responded to subpoenas, Mr. Trump may cite Harry Truman’s 1953 refusal as a former president to appear before a congressional committee on the basis of the constitutional separation of powers, a precedent that Richard Nixon was prepared to invoke as the Senate Watergate Committee contemplated a subpoena in 1973.

The committee’s unanimous vote almost certainly will fire Mr. Trump’s supporters to portray the subpoena, and thus the entire set of proceedings, as a political inquisition, all the more so because the action came less than a month before the midterm congressional election.

The predicate to the vote to subpoena Mr. Trump was the presentation of evidence – based almost entirely on sources within the Republican Party and inside the Trump circle – that he was determined as long as four months before the Election Day to declare the contest a fraud if returns showed he would lose. It portrayed Mr. Trump as resistant to repeated counsel from top campaign aides that he was defeated and demonstrated that he defied them to continue to try to overturn the election results.

Three-quarters of a century ago, the chamber where the historic subpoena vote was conducted was the setting of the divisive hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which examined the public acts and private views of members of the country’s left and, in fact, subpoenaed former president Mr. Truman to testify. This year, that venue was the setting of equally divisive hearings determined to answer whether the activities and beliefs of the country’s right, and its standard-bearing president, are themselves un-American.

In the middle of the 20th century, hundreds of liberals, socialists and communists were put on a non-judicial trial. In the early years of the third decade of the 21st century, the question can be distilled down to whether Mr. Trump should face a judicial trial for his role in fomenting the worst raid on Capitol Hill since the British advance in 1814.

“The implications of these hearings for Trump involve the law, but also go far beyond legal issues – politics, history, and what the public demands,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, a constitutional law expert at the University of Washington. “It’s hard to predict what these hearings will produce but there’s plenty for the former president and his lawyers to be concerned about.”

Those worries include more than the likelihood that the Jan. 6 committee will advise a criminal referral that would urge the initiation of legal action against Mr. Trump by the Federal Election Commission or by the Justice Department, which already is considering legal action against him for his possession of documents that should have been in the custody of federal archivists.

But it is unclear whether the committee’s findings will affect the court of public opinion.

So far these hearings have not moved public opinion at all. The NBC News poll showed that 52 per cent of those surveyed in January thought Mr. Trump was mainly or solely responsible for the Capitol riots. The figure in August was 50 per cent, a statistically insignificant change. Nor did members of the two parties change their views on Mr. Trump’s responsibility: Republicans (11 per cent in January, 12 per cent in August) and Democrats (91 per cent in January, 90 per cent in August) remained firm in their perspectives. And if the target of the hearings was the vast group of independents, there was no change there either, from the 44 per cent who blamed Mr. Trump in January to the 45 per cent in August.

William D. McInturff, one of the most influential Republican political strategists in the country, said it was difficult to believe the Thursday hearing would change public perceptions. “Attitudes about Donald Trump and Jan. 6 closely divide the country, have not really changed through the hearings, and are already baked into the equation of this election,” he said.

Moreover, some Democrats believe that, in the words of Donna Brazile, a former national party chair, the hearings have been little more than a “motivator for MAGA,” the acronym for Mr. Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” slogan. “From day one,” Ms. Brazile said, “Trump has used these hearings to raise money and boost the cadre of election deniers running across the country.”

Even so, she insists that the country needs to confront the threat she believes the 45th president presents. “Holding Donald Trump accountable is not something anyone gets any joy out of,” she said. “But not holding him accountable would cause untold trauma to our nation and our democracy.”

The decision whether to put a subpoenaed former president on trial is itself deeply divisive – and still is weeks if not months in the future. The 2020 election may have been held 23 months ago, but questions growing out of it remain unresolved.