He would be tried and not convicted. That was already known. The polling had scared most of the wavering Republican back into line. Yes, the case would be made: here were all the reasons to detest and heap opprobrium on Donald Trump. But, likewise, that same case would demonstrate to those who wanted to see it this way how unfairly he had been maligned and pursued and with what strength and countenance he had stood up to the witch hunters who were after him.

And by the way, the election was so stolen.

Nobody, apparently, could escape from this cycle. Therefore, you might assume that—even with every Democrat now praising Joe Biden’s low profile, careful discipline, and policy focus—nobody wanted to escape from this permanent state of maximal righteousness and daily drama. Everybody existed, still, in relationship to Donald Trump. Hence, without him you might not exist.

Or, many could simply not exist in a world that was not trying to destroy Donald Trump, even though every effort to destroy him merely confirmed the most torturously excruciating and confounding fact of modern life, which was this: he might be indestructible.

Still, you had to keep making the effort, didn’t you?

History now had to try find its footing between high crimes and misdemeanors and low farce.

If process is the true theater of government—its glue, its logic, its language—then Trump, by his disregard for it, and lack of understanding of it, and yet insistence on his own domination over it, broke the proscenium over and over again. And there was no better example of this than his second impeachment trial, wherein his defense was absent point, method, or strategy, other than that he was at the center of it.

In his first trial, the president had been accused of a complicated now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t collusion with foreign actors and entities. In the second, the House of Representatives radically simplified its charges: now he was accused, more vividly, of inciting a riot. But essentially it was the same premise: of all the president’s bad behavior, all of it in some sense impeachable for Democrats, here was a snapshot of behavior so outrageous that it must surely convince some Republicans to vote against him, or hopelessly shame them if they didn’t. It did not.

While it did not succeed in bringing around Republicans in the House, the Democrats now proceeded to the Senate trial, with a new team of lawyers primed to make their passionate case against the president with the carefully curated and highly produced video evidence of his call to arms, and then, obvious to all for whom it was obvious, his clear connection to the conflagration at the Capitol, beginning just minutes later.