“Oh, man. I just saw the way everybody was looking at those videos. Oh, man.”

There were the three speaking lawyers in the room: Castor; his partner, Mike van der Veen, a personal injury lawyer—it was van der Veen’s law firm that Castor had joined in December—and Schoen. Then the support team: Julieanne Bateman, an associate at the van der Veen firm who no one would remember ever saying a word; and Adam, the law school intern, never without a piece of bubble gum, constantly getting yelled at by van der Veen. There was one outside First Amendment lawyer, David Hein, recruited by Castor and van der Veen to advise on the fine line between free speech and incitement; and Bill Brennan, another Philadelphia lawyer who had some experience with First Amendment issues. There were, also in the room, three Trump loyalists from the House: Jim Jordan from Ohio, Mike Johnson from Louisiana, and Andy Biggs from Arizona. On the Trump operations side, there were Jason Miller; Alex Cannon; Sonny Nelson, who handled TV bookings; Ben Williamson, who had been Meadows’s chief deputy; and Ali Pardo, a former Trump campaign comms staffer. Ory Rinat and Sam Brown were the video team. And then there was Schoen’s son, Simon.

And everybody was shell-shocked.

“They surprised us! This was unfair,” said Castor about the Dems’ video. “They caught us flat-footed. We didn’t know!”

“What do you mean ‘we didn’t know’?” said Miller, coming to the end of his first week shepherding the makeshift legal team. “We knew. What did you think?”

“We didn’t know they would be this good.”

“You were told. McConnell’s people said this was how it would play out.”

“But it was so emotional,” said a bereft Castor. “We got smacked with those videos. We can’t pretend they weren’t played. And we can’t go out now with our legalistic argument.”

This was Schoen’s piece, the jurisdictional case, and he became plaintive and sullen.

“We have to take the temperature down,” argued Castor, proposing that he, instead of Schoen, open, making what he billed as introductory remarks and an outline of their larger case.

“But that’s my time,” said Schoen. “You’re going to cut into my time.”

“No—just a short opening, just to take down the temperature,” assured Castor. Everybody agreed.

Fifteen minutes into Castor’s opening, Trump was putting through calls to anyone in the LBJ Room whose number he had—and to lawyers in the first impeachment who no longer represented him—pronouncing this the worst speech ever given in the U.S. Senate or, for that matter, in the history of mankind.

What’s more, Castor looked like a man who’d had a Biggest Loser–size weight loss but who was still wearing his fat-man suit. Castor kept trying to explain, the camera added ten pounds to a person—and, apparently, three sizes to Castor’s Dick Tracy suit.