WASHINGTON Six months after their leader tried to overturn the election he had lost by more than 7 million votes, Republicans have settled on a message about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol : Insurrection? What insurrection?

From calls to let bygones be bygones, to punishing dissidents who dare criticize former President Donald Trump for instigating that days attack, to literally describing the mob as no different from everyday tourists, the Republican Party with notable exceptions has pushed the idea that the unprecedented attempt to overthrow American democracy was really no big deal.

And, if recent polling is correct, they appear to be succeeding. According to a recent Morning Consult survey , fully 41% of Americans believe that the riot of Jan. 6 has received too much attention, compared with 50% who do not. That figure is driven by 68% of Republicans who say that but includes more than a third of independents and even a quarter of Democrats .

Laurence Tribe , a Harvard law professor who believes the country barely dodged a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6, said many Americans simply would rather not think about that day.

Its human nature to suppress terrible forebodings that dont quite materialize, he said, adding that the barrage of Trump-inspired crises during his term likely laid the groundwork. The cascade of terrible events and near-misses over the past four years has desensitized people if not entirely anesthetized them.

Hans Noel, a political science professor at Georgetown University, said that Republicans also have an active interest in wishing Jan. 6 away.

Generally, conservatives, particularly those who get their news from other conservatives, will come to downplay the attack, Noel said. Some of that is just believing its not a big deal. Some of it is not wanting to talk about uncomfortable facts as they come out. But this is the main thing: The partisan messaging on this has been to downplay it for Republicans, Trump supporters and others on the right.

Whatever its causes, the process of memory-holing that day reflects Trumps continued success at fashioning an outrageous lie and then browbeating Republican leaders into going along with him.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, for example, said on Jan. 13 on the House floor that Trump bears responsibility for Wednesdays attack on Congress by mob rioters. Within weeks, he had gone to visit Trump at his Palm Beach resort and posed for a photo with him. And, at the six-month mark of the mob assault, he is attacking those few GOP House members, such as Wyomings Liz Cheney, who refuse to bend to Trumps will.

McCarthys office did not respond to HuffPost queries. On Thursday, he said of Cheneys acceptance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi s appointment to serve on a select committee to investigate Jan. 6: Maybe shes closer to her than us. He had warned Republicans who would serve on that panel that they would be stripped of their committee assignments.

If most Americans have indeed forgotten about Jan. 6, that is in part due to the tenacious efforts of the GOP to downplay it, said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University. For a party whose brand is law enforcement, Jan. 6s murderous rage against Capitol Police could turn voters off. So they deny the violence Trump turned it into hugs and kisses and block any investigation that would place the facts of it in the public realm.

It Cant Happen Here, But Almost Did

Working in Republicans favor is just how brazen Trumps attempt to overturn the November election was.

In 232 years of presidential contests, there have been 16 incumbents who tried to win a second term but failed, starting with John Adams in 1800. Trump was the first to try to overturn democracy itself in an attempt to hang on to power.

Americans are still somewhat uncomprehending that it can happen here, in terms of the demise of their democracy, said Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism.

Though there was no legal way for Trump to undo Democrat Joe Biden s victory after the Electoral College formally completed its tally on Dec. 14, Trump was not particularly interested in legalities. Instead, he spent weeks, according to Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, pushing his vice president to simply reject enough electoral votes from states Biden had won to wind up with more and declare himself the winner.

And although Pence had no constitutional authority to do what Trump wanted, nothing prevented him from doing as Trump demanded anyway an action that would have unleashed unimaginable chaos, possibly including armed conflict in the streets, upon the country.

Very few people ever understood what would have happened and where we would be as a nation had the vice president not certified the Electoral College vote, said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appellate judge nominated by President George H.W. Bush.

That lack of understanding played into the hands of Republicans whose greatest success has been to obfuscate Jan. 6s uniqueness in American history by lumping it in with other violence, such as the vandalism and looting that at times accompanied protests last summer over the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans.