I remember when Dr. Timothy Snyder was making the rounds on the political talks shows in 2017 warning about the impending fascism of Trump. I remember thinking at that time that Trump was too dumb and incompetent to actually be a fascist. When Jan 6 came around, everyone was lauded Dr. Snyder claiming that he predicted it. But the decisive moment came when Trump capitulated and went on TV calling for the Jan 6 riot to end. If Trump was really a fascist, he would have called on the military to seize Congress and made a naked grab for power. But he didn't.
Trump is not a fascist. Trump is a capitalist who comes from a long line of CEOs and powerful capitalists who see the world as a competition where the rules are for suckers. Trump's stop the steal was nothing like Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch or Pinochet shelling the presidential palace. It was more like Phillip Morris claiming for decades that cigarette do not cause cancer or Exxon Mobil knowing that CO2 emissions causes climate change but spending millions on PR campaigns claiming the exact opposite. Trump was formed in a capitalist economy where wrongdoers regularly win and rarely are held accountable. Trump business career has from the beginning been all about winning at any costs and to hell with the rules. So, stop the steal was not an attempt to subvert democracy and implement fascism. It was a marketing ploy to try to turn a bad loss into a win. It came out of a business ethic (or lack thereof) that says you do whatever it takes to win and those who follow the rules are weak losers.
With that in mind, the criminal charges around January 6 are necessary not because our democracy depends on it. They are necessary because there is an ongoing battle in our society between those who believe like Trump that life is just a game where you do whatever it takes to win no matter who gets hurt in the process and all the regular people who get hurt. Trump is just on a continuum from asbestos to black lung to the S&L crisis to 2008 housing crash to Enron to FTX and so on.