purely self-serving.

One thing that I think was going on when all this was going on in real-time (from election day to the inauguration) is so many Trumpy people had no idea how it was going to end, but at the same time there was a group of Trump-based institutionalists with still an understanding and belief of how things would end up going (that is the inauguration and a peaceful transition of power would happen because that is how things were supposed to go) and they knew their reputation and standing in history would be later tarnished, so they got off the crazy train at the last minute.

What I'm getting at is the Barr's, Pence's, and all of these others that are being hailed as "heroes" for their role, really just did it because they believed things would happen just as they should happen and just as in the past and with integrity the courts would do their job and push aside Trump's claims when challenged. 

Personally, I believe if these historical institutionalists had any sort of belief Trump was going to be successful regardless of facts, then they would have remained on the train.

I'm having a hard time explaining my thought - but what it gets down to is these past Trump years have been something we have never faced before and the roadmap had yet to be printed.  So in my view, these "heroes" only did what they were supposed to do because none of this had ever happened before and they just interpreted events with a past historical eye and thought if they did not do what they did, then history would bury them because what Trump was doing was so unheard of.

Hope that the last paragraph made my thoughts a bit clearer.