Four years ago today, then-candidate Donald Trump lashed out at one of his foes on Twitter. His target at the time was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who had just won the Iowa caucuses. The real estate mogul ultimately came in second place after leading in some polls before the contest. Trump did not respond to his rival’s victory with graciousness or humility. Instead, without a shred of evidence, he rejected the results and charged Cruz with electoral fraud.

“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump wrote in one tweet. “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” he added in another. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated.” Trump even urged state officials to intervene: “The State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated—a total fraud!”

Trump’s corrosive response to his Iowa defeat came to mind on Monday when California Representative Adam Schiff took the floor to deliver his closing arguments in Trump’s impeachment trial. Over the last two weeks, Schiff and the other House managers laid out how the president was guilty of the sins that he so often attributes to others. It will likely not matter. The Republican-led Senate refused to hear from additional witnesses or seek new documents on Friday; it is virtually certain to acquit the president on both articles of impeachment on Wednesday.



Schiff, cognizant of what lay ahead, did not strike an optimistic note. “Midnight in Washington,” he declared as he began. “All too tragic a metaphor for where the country finds itself at the conclusion of only the third impeachment in history and the first impeachment trial without witnesses or documents.” Having already laid out the factual and legal case for convicting Trump, he appeared on Monday as a prophet in the wilderness to tell Republican senators in powerful terms what they were about to do.

Schiff again took aim at Alan Dershowitz’s assertion last week that a president could not be impeached for any abuse of power, no matter how egregious or self-serving. Schiff denounced the Harvard University law professor emeritus’s analysis as dangerous and absurd. “Under this theory, as long as the president believes his reelection was in the public interest, he could do anything and no quid pro quo is corrupt, no damage to national security too great,” he warned. “This was such an extreme view that even the president’s other lawyers had to run away from it.”