But Alex Cannon intercepted him. “David, we can’t let you leave.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Schoen.

“I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t try to leave now.”

Cannon and Justin Clark then followed Schoen to his room to keep him from fleeing.

But at 10:42 on Thursday night, Schoen bailed anyway, sending an email saying he’d sit at the table, but he wasn’t going to do anything more.

The plan, then, with no alternative, was to bring back the benched Castor to deliver Schoen’s part, using the videographer’s script. Castor was walked through the speech for most of the night, but, as though he’d ingested Donald Trump, he seemed unable to keep himself from off-point digressions and spontaneous ad-libs.

Shortly after dawn, the president called to say that Schoen had just called him and said that they—Miller, Clark, Cannon, and Herschmann, the thugs—had refused to let him give his speech. “Work with him. Come on, work with him,” Trump insisted.

“I didn’t even call the president,” said a still-petulant Schoen to the Trump team. “He called me to say he wanted me to do it. He’s pushing me to go do it. I don’t even want to do it.”

In the second impeachment of Donald Trump—the fourth impeachment in the history of the republic—David Schoen, never having finished writing his own remarks, delivered the videographer’s argument.

Castor, who had been read in, was then read out—but shortly read in again, because while Schoen would do his opening part, he had to be out by sundown, for the Sabbath. Castor would therefore—even as, at the moment, Trump’s most scorned lawyer, a position occupied over the years by hundreds—get to deliver the closing remarks.

In his new gray Samuelsohn suit, Castor almost immediately rambled off script. On live television, he could be seen being handed a note and ignoring it—it was a pointed prod from Miller, telling him to stay on script. Ten minutes later, still rambling, looking this way and that, he could be seen receiving another note and looking at it:

Get back on script and read the speech as written or I am going to come out there and pull you. Jason.

Castor hesitated for a second and then put his nose down in the prepared speech and read it out to the end.

The real point, beyond the Democrats’ continuing and wildly misguided perception that they could bring shame upon Trump, was, after impeaching and convicting, to banish him from public office. McConnell, no one questioned, would love to have joined them, with at least the sixteen other Republicans needed to convict, all whose lives would be made much easier without Donald Trump in American political life, not far behind.

But if you are going to kill the king …

Therein lay the problem: even conviction and banishment might not yet have made him dead enough.