Donald Trump went into the first day of his second impeachment trial reportedly feeling about as good as someone who’s set a record for presidential impeachments can feel. Not only was he not worried about the stain of inciting a violent insurrection, but he and his lawyers reportedly viewed the proceedings as a positive because they would “cement” his “influence over the Republican party.” Fast-forward a day and Trump is apparently feeling a lot less hot, thanks to the opening statement delivered by his defense team, which could best be described as, “What the f–k was that?”
Unlike his first impeachment trial, the ex-president is unable to tweet his way through it, but he nevertheless made his feelings known. According to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Trump was “basically screaming” as Bruce Castor Jr. gave his meandering, incomprehensible argument over the course of nearly 50 interminable minutes, each one worse than the last. Attempting to quantify his rage, people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the angriest, Trump “was an eight,” which we assume is similar to his anger level when, after being frisked on the way out of the White House on January 20, he was told that no, he couldn’t take the flatware with him.
Of course, it’s not entirely surprising that Trump’s defense gave a less than inspiring opening statement—one that was so bad that it got Republican senator Bill Cassidy to make a last-minute change and vote with Democrats. After being charged with inciting an insurrection, Trump found that not one of the lawyers originally expected to represent him would. Days before his trial kicked off, the legal team Lindsey Graham helped set Trump up with quit, reportedly over the ex-president’s insistence that they argue the 2020 election was stolen from him, which obviously would have been a lie. That left Trump basically scraping the bottom of the barrel of the legal profession, which explains how he ended up with Castor—who, earlier in his career, fought to keep Bill Cosby out of prison—and David Schoen, who said he had considered defending Jeffrey Epstein before the notorious pedophile died in prison. (Schoen has also worked with “accused rapists, capital murderers, and international narcotics dealers,” per the Atlanta Jewish Times. He told the outlet that he had “represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia, and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world.”) Oh, and this guy! Per The Washington Post: