Before the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump began Tuesday, it may have been tempting to think of it as a sequel to a show that had been canceled, a sequel no one needed.
"Not more of him," I heard someone moan beforehand, in the way I've heard people talk about the "Sex and the City" reboot. "Can't we just move on?"
This person was no Trump fan, just a regular American tired of feeding the former president's bottomless need for attention and the media's bottomless need for ratings and clicks. It's an understandable exhaustion. For years Trump — with his tweets, his threats, his preening, his lies — hijacked our minds, our time, our politics. Enough already.
But any impulse to "just move on" from the insurrection Trump stoked at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was surely extinguished Tuesday in the minds of all rational people. It wasn't the legal arguments over the trial's constitutionality that made the strongest case for continuing this saga, and it wasn't the history lessons.
The persuasion was in the video.
There it was again, that crazy January day, relived on the screens in the U.S. Senate chamber and on screens all over the country.
There was President Trump urging his supporters to march to the Capitol, warning them, "If you don't fight like hell you're not gonna have a country anymore."
There was the giant mob, fueled by a delusion that the presidential election was stolen, waving Trump flags, sporting camouflage garb and red MAGA caps, kicking down the Capitol barricades, shoving through Capitol doors, shouting vulgarities, threatening police officers they called pigs.