Tom Cotton played with the fidget spinner Richard Burr had handed out to all the Republicans. Marsha Blackburn and others left to trash the proceedings on Fox News.

The senators in the Democratic presidential race could not have been happy to be stuck there, either. Bernie Sanders, accustomed to making like Leonard Bernstein at big rallies and upset he’s not in Iowa to relish his surge, had a hard time keeping his hands still, moving them restlessly, silently clapping, and finally holding them together on his chest over his blue sweater.

But heads on both sides did snap to attention whenever that unholy, jangly, self-impeaching peal, so inescapable in the last three years, rang out in the hallowed chamber. Trump’s voice was impossible to ignore when the House impeachment managers played incriminating video clips of the human fidget spinner himself, sometimes howling over the blades of his chopper on the South Lawn.

So many people in this very room had tried and failed, or are now trying, to vanquish the guy. Romney, Cruz, Rubio, Graham, Klobuchar, Sanders, Bennet, Booker, Gillibrand, Warren, Harris. Trump had savaged all his fellow Republicans and yet here they were listening to an unending recitation of his crimes and coming out to be his Praetorian guard.

Adam Schiff tried to warn the former nemeses turned defenders of Trump that if the president is not removed, he could turn on them the way he had turned on Marie Yovanovitch and Joe Biden, using the power of the presidency to cheat, lie and smear. (Now Rudy’s buddy Lev Parnas says he has forked over to congressional Democrats a 2018 recording of Trump personally ordering Yovanovitch to be fired.)

“The next time, it just may be you,” Schiff told the Republican senators. “Do you think he wouldn’t ask you to be investigated? Do you think for a moment that he wouldn’t?”

Schiff also reminded Republicans that Trump had inverted their dogma, embracing the Evil Empire and authoritarianism and trusting Crazy Rudy’s conspiracy theories over his own intelligence services.