The big takeaway from the presentation we just saw from Donald Trump’s legal team is that the outcome of the former president’s trial is preordained, and his lawyers know it.

It’s simply not possible for Republican Senators to claim in good faith that what they heard on Friday afternoon was even remotely convincing. Yet even Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who’s supposed to be open to conviction (and very well may be), put on a show of pretending she thought the Trump team’s case was strong.

Trump’s lawyers made four main arguments. They’re all terrible.

1) Trump’s team argued that his Jan. 6 speech inciting the insurrection was constitutionally protected and therefore not subject to an impeachment proceeding.

That’s ridiculous: Speech can be protected while still representing a threat to the constitutional order when coming from a president. Trump deliberately incited a violent effort to disrupt the constitutional processes governing the peaceful conclusion of a presidential election.

When the violence was in progress, he allowed it to continue for hours, ignoring entreaties that he call off the mob. Even if his exhortations were protected speech, they — along with the rest of his misconduct — are impeachable.

2) Trump’s team aired video showing numerous Democrats using the word “fight” in all kinds of contexts (which were almost never included). That was supposed to show Trump’s use of the word while inciting the insurrection was somehow analogous.

That’s also absurd: Trump’s efforts actually did incite the violent assault on the Capitol. Many rioters have confirmed this in their own words. As two researchers who closely examined the motives of the rioters recently concluded in the Atlantic:

The overwhelming reason for action, cited again and again in court documents, was that arrestees were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner.

That completely destroys the fake equivalence Trump’s lawyers tried to draw (indeed, the whole point of the equivalence was to erase this glaring problem they face).

3) Trump’s team argued that because Trump used the word “peacefully” during his Jan. 6 harangue, he couldn’t possibly have intended the mob to get violent.

This is silly: It entirely sidesteps Trump’s well known use of mob-speak (as his own former fixer Michael Cohen has explained) to communicate his intentions while maintaining plausible deniability for them. It also elides just how reckless it was for Trump to drive the enraged mob toward the Capitol, when he surely knew what the result almost certainly would be.

Indeed, Trump himself had gone to great lengths to bring about that result, and Trump’s lawyers sidestepped this, too. He spent weeks telling his supporters (in the form of the stolen-election lie) that they were the victims of a monstrous injustice that they could only rectify by taking matters into their own hands (they were justified in using “very different rules,” as he put it), or their country would perish.

There is simply no question that Trump knew exactly how this might turn out. Not only that, Trump refused to call off the mob for hours after the violence started, which is strange behavior if he intended it to be peaceful. Which leads to...

4) Trump’s team argued he couldn’t have possibly incited the riot because some of the insurrectionists preplanned the assault. Trump’s lawyers showed a bunch of evidence designed to demonstrate this.

But it’s an absurd argument. It entirely erases from the story all of the public statements Trump made in the run-up to Jan. 6th.

The entire “Stop the Steal” movement, which culminated in Trump supporters from all over the country converging on the Capitol — leading to the assault — was relentlessly promoted by Trump’s propagandists and supporters, including Trump himself.

Here’s a partial sampling of Trump statements, culled from this Just Security timeline and this New York Times rundown:

Dec. 19: Trump tweets: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th … Be there, will be wild!”

Dec. 27: Trump tweets: “See you in Washington, DC, on January 6th. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.”

Dec. 30: Trump tweets: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!”

Jan. 1: Trump tweets: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

Jan. 3: Trump tweets a response to a supporter: “I will be there. Historic day!”

This doesn’t even include the many times Trump urged Republicans to subvert the results in Congress during the Jan. 6 count, which blared out to supporters that this was their last chance at a final apocalyptic showdown. Nor does it include the many times Trump’s propagandists and supporters also promoted the Jan. 6 last stand in similarly lurid and urgent terms.

The last argument is particularly troubling. It shows Trump’s team feels no obligation to engage in any remotely serious way with the mountains of evidence that have piled up from the weeks leading up to the attack. Instead, they just keep robotically repeating that the speech on Jan. 6 alone couldn’t have possibly incited the attack. All those weeks are simply being erased.

Yet despite the obvious hollowness of such arguments, virtually all GOP senators, perhaps with at most a few exceptions, will vote to acquit him. That they will not be even remotely troubled by the utter failure to engage with that entire backstory only confirms how firmly the fix is in.

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