What kind of spectacle is the impeachment trial before the Senate of Donald J. Trump? In its opening days, the audience was given two wildly different but equally bathetic prompts as to how we should see it. We were invited by two central figures to understand it, on the one hand, as a proceeding of exquisite gravity and, on the other, as a bad TV show. For its presiding officer, Chief Justice John Roberts, the trial ought to be imagined as an earnest weighing up of truth and lies by a most august assembly. Near the end of the first long day’s session, he admonished Trump’s prosecutors and defenders “to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” To give them a sense of the standards that used to apply in such proceedings, he referred to the impeachment of a judge, Charles Swayne:
In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word “pettifogging” and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used. I don’t think we need to aspire to that high a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.
But we do not need to go back to 1905 to be reminded where we all are now. On the morning of the second day of the trial, its central figure, Trump himself, issued a decorous tweet:
After having been treated unbelievably unfairly in the House, and then having to endure hour after hour of lies, fraud & deception by Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer & their crew, looks like my lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death Valley in TV.
The fall from a discourse in which “pettifogging” might sound like an unseemly breach of high civility is vertiginous, but this is also a shift of genres. Roberts wished to dress the senators in togas and place them in a historical drama, leaning forward with their hands on their chins, as if listening intently to Cicero or Seneca. Trump’s complaint was that his wrestling match against Shifty Schiff and Cryin’ Chuck would be shown in a crappy television time slot.
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The Senate is supposed to be acting as a kind of court. But it is showing itself to be a court in a different sense: almost all Republican senators are now quite openly behaving as courtiers. It is impertinent for courtiers even to go through the motions of putting the monarch on trial. They cannot be seen to consider evidence because that would imply that there is some objective reality against which Trump’s motives could be measured. They cannot even pretend to deliberate because that would imply that deliberation can hold its own against the imperative of Trump’s will. They cannot question what the president has done because that would violate the principle that his reasons are unquestionable. What is lost for them and for Trump in this process is any possible claim that the president has been vindicated by a genuine trial of the evidence against him. What is gained is the assurance that, if Trump wins a second term, he can indeed do whatever he wants.