It was both a strong case, if you wanted it to be strong, and quite a weak one, if you didn’t. Certainly, there was a direct relationship between a cadre of people storming the Capitol and Donald Trump’s long pattern of encouragement of fringe groups and their cultural and antiestablishment grievances. But at the same time, this encouragement, this incitement, was also, in its specific form, just more Trump blah-blah—he opened his mouth and rambled for most of the hours he spoke at any given event, including the precipitating speech at the Ellipse on January 6, just filling space, ever returning to his continuing mental and verbal loop, now and then adding a new crowd-pleasing inspiration. Certainly, it was a dramatic leap to credit him with intent. It suggested an ability to join cause and effect, and the logic of a plan, that anyone who knew him or had worked with him certainly understood he did not possess. And yet, at the same time, it was surely true that the locusts would not have descended on the Capitol without him.

So, here he and the Democrats were again, with them trying to assign cause and effect to him and with most of his Republican defenders pretty comfortable in their knowledge that, in any kind of literal, screwing-in-a-lightbulb sense, he could hardly be held responsible for conceiving and executing a plan—as would be seen once again in the way he coordinated his own defense.

The few people left in the Trump White House in the final days had accomplished one last task: they had kept Rudy out, blocking a hard push from the one man who might actually have gotten Trump convicted had he managed to come in and take over the impeachment defense. Still, Rudy spread it around that he was, of course, the president’s guy (telling confidants he “needed” to represent the president here, “I just have to”), spooking other potential defenders—or, at least, providing them with an understandable excuse not to join the case themselves. Who, among the right-minded and reasonably competent, would willingly work with Rudy?

This left the now-former president, in early February, blinking into the light, without any lawyers. The legislative branch of the U.S. government, with all its power, was exercising its constitutional prerogative to put the executive branch, with its coequal powers, on trial—but complicating matters, and certainly depriving him of the coequal might of the executive branch, Trump was no longer the executive. This was the favored procedural argument of Republicans looking not to convict him but not necessarily to defend him, either. But it also prompted practical questions and considerations: how does a private citizen, one without any particular expertise in government or constitutional matters or legislative process—that he happened to have been the president did not mean he had gained this expertise—and one who, for many reasons, most of his own making, had limited access to legal help, defend himself?