Andrew Sullivan

Trump is being defended by Foghorn Leghorn

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Andrew Sullivan has narrated this article for you to listen to.

We weren’t long into Bruce Castor’s opening speech defending Donald Trump in his impeachment trial before we knew it was going to be special. ‘I don’t want to steal the thunder from the other lawyers’ thunder,’ Castor intoned to a mildly befuddled Senate. ‘But Nebraska, you’re going to hear, is quite a judicial thinking place.’ We never got around to the payoff for that one, but there were plenty of other amusements. We learned about the ‘Greek Republic’, which apparently awaits salvation from the United States Senate. We had a tech update: ‘We all know what records are, right: the thing you put the needle down on it and then play it.’ My favourite: ‘The floodgates will open. I was going to say originally it will release the whirlwind, but I subsequently learned since I got here that that particular phrase has already been taken, so I figured I would change it to floodgates.’

These somewhat weird ramblings were gussied up only in the past few days because the former president of the United States couldn’t get any serious lawyers to represent him for the longest time. They were all instructed that they could never concede for a millisecond that Trump had actually lost the election, which is a bit of a problem if your core — and weak — constitutional argument is that the Senate can’t impeach a private citizen. So we were left with Foghorn Leghorn and a fastidious sidekick who for some reason kept grabbing the top of his head as if a phantom yarmulke was threatening to fall off.

And all of this surreal comedy led to just one Republican Senator, Bill Cassidy, changing his mind from a previous vote and supporting the trial.

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