How bad has Trump’s impeachment defense been? “My cousin Vinny” was trending on Twitter.

President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial on Tuesday opened with a devastating presentation from House Directors showing why the former president’s actions deserved condemnation and demonstrating the immediate danger of failing to convict Trump and ban him from his future duties. It was a difficult act to follow.

How has Trump’s legal team – pulled from the bottom of the barrel following a falling out with his first team and the refusal of big business and conservative lawyers to represent him – reacted?

Bruce Castor, the former Pennsylvania District Attorney who is most famous for refusing to prosecute Bill Cosby for rape, opened up the defense case and let’s just say it didn’t go well.

Here is a sample of the Twitter responses:

Before the defense presentation, “My cousin Vinny” was all the rage on Twitter.

What was so bad about Castor’s performance? For one thing, in what was meant to be the opening of a specific procedural and jurisdictional defense, it was difficult to identify a cohesive narrative thread or a particular legal argument that he was trying to make. Castor essentially conceded this at the end, saying he produced his rambling presentation on the fly in response to how well House managers had championed their cause.

“I will be very frank with you, we changed what we were going to do because we thought the presentation of the directors of the House was well done,” Castor said.

He went on to say that the legal team had answers to the case of merit presented by the House Directors at the start of the trial, and they would get there… eventually. But because officials presented the meat of the alleged crime from the outset, rather than simply debating the Senate’s jurisdiction, he said Trump’s team was unprepared. “I thought what the first part of the case was, which was the equivalent of a motion to reject, was going to be about jurisdiction only,” Castor said. “We have counter arguments to everything they raised, and you will hear them later in the case.”

From the point of view of pleasing his client, the dog ate homework routine wasn’t even the worst. In an effort to convince the Senate that the impeachment trial was not necessary, Castor has repeatedly pointed out that the American people have already fairly voted Trump out of office – the opposite of what Trump had said in his months of complaints about the election theft, which ultimately inspired his supporters to attack the Capitol.

“The American people just spoke and they just changed administrations,” Castor said. Therefore, there is no need to impeach Trump and ban him from future office because the electoral system – which Trump has just spent two months trying to overthrow, and which the crowd on January 6 sought to stop by violence – finally worked. “People are smart enough … to pick a new administration if they don’t like the old one,” Castor said. “And they did!”

Inexplicably, Castor repeated the Trump lost the election so you don’t have to punish him for trying to steal him argument several times before going to land, the former president will surely appreciate even less: if the Senate decides that he does not have jurisdiction to try Trump, then he can still be sued by the Justice Department.

“Once he’s out of office, you’re going to stop him,” Castor said. “So there is no opportunity for the President of the United States to run wild in January at the end of his term and simply go free. The Department of Justice knows what to do about these people and so far I have not seen any such activity.

And, again, these were Castor’s most – perhaps the only – intelligible points. After speaking, the defense team then moved on to David Schoen, who made a more passionate and somewhat more coherent argument that the current impeachment is a “partisan witch hunt” against the president without any merit. .

In the end, maybe there was a strategy for the double act. Schoen’s performance was an aggressive attack on those responsible for impeachment, one of whom had just spoken of the devastating trauma he and his family experienced on the day of the attack on the Capitol. Castor’s bizarre and absurd ramblings may have served as a palace cleaner, so Schoen’s scathing criticism from the House side did not directly follow the powerful performance of impeachment official, Rep. Jamie Raskin. . All that defenders of the president have to do, in the end, is prevent 17 Republican senators from joining the Democrats.

In the end, only six Republicans joined Democrats in voting that a trial of a former president is constitutional and should continue – the Sens. Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse – which means it looks like there are already enough votes for Republicans to acquit Trump no matter what arguments they hear . Cassidy was the only Republican to initially signal a wish to dismiss the case to change his vote this time around, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – who has reportedly spoken positively about impeachment from the start – voting again with the vast majority of the rest of his conference. to let Trump get away with it.

Castor and Schoen may have made it more embarrassing for them to stay with Trump, but if the past four years have shown anything, it was the limits of shame as a political force.