At the Capitol, two dozen people crammed into Room S-211, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, across the hall from the floor of the Senate. Here was a scrum of Trump lawyers, support staff, comms team members, and people from the office of the Republican leader Mitch McConnell: David Popp, McConnell’s comms director; Stefanie Muchow, his deputy chief of staff; and Andrew Ferguson, the minority counsel, all three sheepish in their sudden roles as Trump hand-holders, as unsure of their function here as everybody else.

This was the first in-person meeting of the Trump defense team and of the Republican leadership upon whom Trump’s fate depended. To say that nobody on the defense side had the slightest idea what approach anyone else had in mind for the fourth impeachment trial in history and the second in thirteen months would be an understatement. Once again here was a familiar Trump nexus: everybody hoping that somebody else could make sense of the lack of plan and purpose that at all times attended Donald Trump, or at least step forward to try.

The McConnell people, who would somehow have to summon the pretense that there was a reasonable defense here and who, indeed, had four years of experience dealing with the radical peculiarities of the Trump White House, nevertheless seemed slack-jawed and stunned: the Democrats had a new majority, a righteous cause, and in addition, they had just done the impeachment-and-trial drill a year ago. The Trump team, for its part, rustled up from no one knew where, was certainly looking like a gang that couldn’t shoot straight—indeed, they seemed likely to shoot one another.

Bruce Castor, who was still trying to fix the typos, was also micromanaging the seating of the defense in the Senate Chamber, where everyone would be positioned for the fixed television camera there. Television time was the payoff.

David Schoen, a solo practitioner from Montgomery, Alabama, had been designated by Trump as the lead lawyer. But then Bruce Castor announced to the team that he would in fact, damn it, be the lead lawyer. This was after the first set of lawyers, a group of local boys from South Carolina corralled by that state’s senator Lindsey Graham after a golf date with Trump, had been dismissed within days of signing on.

Schoen now had gone into a sullen, alarming funk—a strike of sorts, it suddenly seemed, only a day before the trial was to begin. Here was the stop-the-trial crisis: Castor had not provided a place for Schoen’s college-age son, Simon, to sit on the Senate Floor.

It was hard to know why someone would take on the defense of Donald J. Trump. Most lawyers—over and over again—had run from the opportunity. But now here might be an understandable reason: Schoen wanted to impress his offspring.