On Friday night, the Democratic House managers completed their presentation to the Senate of the evidence that Donald Trump abused his office, by trying to extort the government of Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his son, and then obstructed justice, by ordering officials throughout the executive branch to ignore congressional subpoenas. On Saturday morning, Trump’s White House legal team began its defense of the President, arguing he did nothing wrong.

If the Washington soothsayers are proved right, and they probably will be, the outcome of the impeachment trial has been predetermined: a rapid acquittal for Trump. The Times reported on Friday that when the Senate votes again on whether to call live witnesses and view undisclosed documents, probably sometime next week, Democrats are unlikely to get the four Republican votes that they need. Soon after that vote, this could be all over, with Trump ballyhooing and gloating over the verdict.

Such an outcome would be a victory of tribalism and power politics over jurisprudence and justice. The Senate Republicans may well vote to acquit Trump, but they will not be able to erase the record that Adam Schiff and his colleagues laid down clearly, methodically, and meticulously over three days of arguments. As my colleague Susan B. Glasser noted on Thursday, in one of her daily impeachment diaries, the House Democrats “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.”

As they went along, the House managers were also careful to point to gaps in the record that could have been filled if the President hadn’t prevented many key witnesses and documents from being presented to Congress. Without being overly melodramatic, the Democratic representatives also highlighted the moral burden that rests on the fifty-three Republican senators who will determine Trump’s fate. In terms of the trial verdict, this may all have been in vain. But the verdict of history will be very different.

Nobody who watched even some of the House managers’ presentation could be in any doubt that there was, indeed, an illicit scheme to coerce Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, into announcing an investigation into a Ukrainian company that employed Hunter Biden; that this scheme was carried out with Trump’s knowledge, and at his behest; and that the President and his staff did all they possibly could to prevent the details from emerging. “He tried to cheat, he got caught, and then he worked hard to cover it up,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, one of the House managers, noted on Friday, in a succinct summary of the case.

All seven of the House managers had their moments during the long presentation, but the undoubted star was Schiff, a former federal prosecutor who would have made a brilliant trial lawyer. With his mastery of details, combined with an ability to explain what they mean in simple terms, plus the seemingly effortless capacity to speak extemporaneously, the fifty-nine year-old California congressman gave a virtuoso performance, which even earned him some plaudits from Republicans. (“I have to say this,” Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, said on Friday morning. “Schiff is very, very effective.”)

From the beginning and throughout the trial, Schiff urged senators not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Late on Thursday night, he noted that Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine wasn’t a one-off: it fit into a pattern of the President putting his own interests ahead of the country, a pattern that would continue if he were allowed to remain in office. “You may be asking, how much damage can he really do in the next several months until the election? A lot. A lot of damage,” Schiff said. “This is why, if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters and truth matters. Otherwise we are lost.”

In his closing remarks on Friday evening, Schiff repeated the argument that Trump’s continued occupation of the Oval Office represents a threat to the country. He also sought to offer a prebuttal of some of the Trump legal team’s arguments, and he called on the Republican senators sitting before him to have the “moral courage” to set aside partisan loyalties. In this section of his remarks, he brought up a CBS News report that quoted a Trump confidant as saying that the Republican senators had been warned: “vote against the president & your head will be on a pike.” This citation angered some of the Republicans, who claimed that the “pike” story wasn’t true. Be that as it may, it captured the larger reality—Trump and his supporters have intimidated most of the G.O.P. into abject submission.

In the coming days, that reality is likely to become clearer than ever, with consequences we can only guess at. As Schiff warned in his closing statement, an acquittal along party lines could upset the delicate balance of powers established in the Constitution and set an alarming precedent for future Presidents. Trump, doubtless, would be even more emboldened, more convinced that he can get away with virtually anything.

It may be that he can, at least until November, but not without pushback. Like many courts across the country during the past three years, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has demonstrated that it won’t submit to Trump’s diktats and lawlessness without protest. As public servants, Schiff and his colleagues did their duty. So did the government officials and the former officials whose testimony formed the basis of the House Democrats’ case. For this, they all deserve great credit. It may not have been enough to drive Trump from office, but at least it showed that he hasn’t yet succeeded in trashing the American polity entirely.