Adam Schiff's Moment in the Trump Impeachment Trial

By Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker

23 January 20

On Day 2 of the Senate impeachment proceedings, the House presents its case—and a senator has a cold glass of milk.

eaving the Senate chamber on Wednesday afternoon for a short break, the Washington Post reporter Paul Kane called over to his colleague Dana Milbank, a Post columnist. “Got milk! Got milk!” Kane said. “We got milk!” Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, was the first verified sighting of a senator actually drinking a glass of milk on the Senate floor during this once-in-a-generation impeachment trial of a President. Until the trial’s opening, the day before, the milk had been the stuff of congressional legend. It was rumored that senators, confined to sit silently in their seats for the entire weeks-long proceedings, deprived of electronics and food, could drink it on the floor, along with water—and only water—but no one seemed to be really sure that it was true.

Now, two afternoons and one very late-night session into the trial of Donald John Trump, it was confirmed. Soon, Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina, was also spotted downing a glass. The Wall Street Journal wrote a blog post about it. There were excited tweets. Cotton’s spokesperson confirmed that the white liquid was, in fact, milk. In truth, the whole Senate looked like it needed a restorative glass. Even late on Wednesday afternoon, the senators still seemed as though they were recovering from the trial’s marathon opening day, which was not technically an all-nighter but close to a Senate version of one.

As the House managers began to methodically lay out their case against President Trump, there was a general hangover quality to Wednesday’s proceedings—a hangover from the sharply partisan tone of the trial’s first day, which culminated in a 1 A.M. admonishment from the otherwise silent Chief Justice John Roberts, who rebuked both sides for “using language that is not conducive to civil discourse.” By the time the trial reconvened, eleven hours later, the Senate chaplain was opening the session with a prayer for “civility” and bromides about how “words have consequences.”

The partisan discord had been the predictable by-product of a partisan House impeachment followed by a partisan set of trial rules, which the Senate adopted, along a strictly party-line vote, as the trial’s first official business. After midnight, Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the seven House managers prosecuting the trial, had given a strident and even angry speech. He accused Senate Republicans—every single one of them—of participating in a “coverup” by refusing to demand that Trump produce witnesses and documents that he has been withholding. His speech triggered an almost shouting response from Trump’s lawyers. Ignoring that, Republicans insisted that they were dismayed by the tone of Nadler’s late-night attack. “It was so insulting and outrageous,” John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, told reporters on Wednesday, before the trial started up again. “It was a shock to all of us.” It wasn’t just Cornyn. “I took it as very offensive. As one who is listening attentively and working hard to get to a fair process, I was offended,” Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, one of the few Republicans who is a potential swing vote, said.

The Democrats seemed to be listening, and the tone struck by Nadler and his House colleagues was notably different on Wednesday, when they began to lay out their case to the Senate. Under the Republican rules for the trial, they will have twenty-four hours in the span of three days to present that case, and then the Trump legal team will have three days to respond. When, soon after 1 P.M., Adam Schiff, the lead House manager, took the floor and began to outline the House’s indictment of Trump, he did not apologize exactly for Nadler’s heated words or for his own scathing characterization of the trial as an “ass-backwards” exercise. But he profusely thanked the senators for their late-night session and attentiveness, lavished praise on the Senate as a deliberative body, and launched into the kind of elevated peroration about the Founders that senators love. Later in the day, Nadler praised the senators for their “temperate listening” in the course of many long hours. “Truly, thank you,” he said. A couple hours later, his House colleague Hakeem Jeffries made sure that the point was made to the prickly senators. “I thank you once again for your indulgence and for your courtesy,” he said.

More substantively, Schiff offered a sweeping survey of the case that leaned hard into themes designed to resonate with national-security-minded Republicans. He reminded them that the allegations involve the President’s withholding of nearly four hundred million dollars in congressionally-appropriated security aid to Ukraine in order to induce Kyiv to launch politically motivated investigations that would help Trump. He spoke of the debunked Russian conspiracy theory “being promulgated by the President of the United States” and of the damage that the whole scandal has done to America’s international standing. He quoted the Republican icon Ronald Reagan and warned that Trump risked empowering autocrats around the world by undercutting American democracy at home. “Russia is not a threat—I don’t need to tell you—to Eastern Europe alone,” Schiff reminded the senators.

As he said it, I looked across the Senate chamber to Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican who just a few years ago had been the Party’s Presidential nominee and had warned that Russia was the greatest geopolitical foe facing the United States. Romney had lost that race, of course, and is now the junior senator from Utah and one of the few Republicans who might be considering voting to convict Trump. Schiff’s pitch seemed aimed almost directly at Romney. In all likelihood, though, there are few, if any, votes that are not accounted for, and few senators who can actually be persuaded by the many, many hours of evidence and argument that they will be forced to sit through in the next few days. “This is [as] predictable as the end of a Hallmark movie,” Representative Mark Meadows, a Republican of North Carolina and a designated Trump-spinner, told reporters during one of the trial’s breaks. His statement was cynical but also probably true.

Still, the House managers made a polished, impassioned stab at convincing their audience, dramatizing their case with an attention-grabbing presentation (designed to keep the senators awake, perhaps?) that included video clips from Trump himself; his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney; and many of the key witnesses from the House’s televised impeachment proceedings. It was a sort of greatest hits of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, a primer for senators—from Trump’s “do us a favor though” demand for investigations, in his July 25th phone call with Ukraine’s President, to Mulvaney’s famous “get over it” press conference, in which he appeared to confirm that Trump had held up the military aid as a quid pro quo for the investigations. To anyone who had followed the House impeachment proceedings, it wasn’t new, but it was frequently eloquent, appalling, and dramatic to hear the alarming facts of the case laid out all over again. As Schiff—a silver-tongued former prosecutor, whose talent for speechifying has been revealed to a national audience in the past few months—pointed out, this makes the impeachment case itself a perfect representative of the whole Trump era, when “so much of the last three years has been a combination of shock, and yet no surprise.”

Even if Schiff was not convincing any senators, the Democrats’ uninterrupted day of speaking on the Senate floor, unrebutted by any Republican, seemed to make the President predictably furious. Although he was travelling back from a short trip to Davos, Switzerland, to bask in the applause of the global financial élite, Trump easily surpassed his previous single-day record of frenetic social-media activity during his Presidency, sending out a stream of more than a hundred and thirty tweets and retweets—the vast majority of them complaints about his impeachment and the Senate trial. At one point, Trump passed along a tweet from Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, who claimed that “the more we hear from Adam Schiff, the more the GOP is getting unified against this partisan charade!” “True!” Trump tweeted. For a President who often has a problem with the facts, he might even have been right. But all it takes is four Republican senators to prove him wrong, four Republicans to vote for witnesses and breach the information blockade that has made Trump perhaps the most successful stonewaller in Presidential history. If he was so confident, why was he tweeting so much?