The Daily Fuckup

By Feb. 7, 2021, the clearest line from Donald Trump’s defenders was not that Jan. 6 did not happen. It was that the Senate should not be the place to judge it.

In the days before the second impeachment trial entered its jurisdiction fight, Trump’s legal team and allied defenders focused on constitutional objections: whether a former president could be tried at all, whether the Senate had authority to proceed after Trump left office, and whether the chamber was being asked to stretch its powers. Those arguments were real and central to the defense strategy.

They also sat next to an equally clear public record. On Jan. 6, a crowd of Trump supporters pushed into the Capitol, lawmakers were evacuated, the building was breached, and the joint session counting electoral votes was interrupted. The attack was not a disputed premise; it was the event at the center of the case.

That left the defense trying to move the debate onto procedure. Ahead of the Senate’s jurisdiction vote, the argument was about timing, forum, and institutional power. That approach may have helped Republicans looking for a narrow constitutional off-ramp, but it did not answer the underlying question of what the Senate was being asked to judge.

For Trump’s allies, that was the point of the strategy. A process fight offered a cleaner escape route than a factual defense of the events of Jan. 6. But the facts were too recent and too public to disappear. The more the defense emphasized venue and jurisdiction, the more it underscored that the case itself came out of the attack on the Capitol, the false election claims that preceded it, and the interruption of the vote count that followed.