Near the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a Democratic staffer working on the House impeachment team received a message from a sibling. “It’s going really well,” the text said. “Do you think there’s a chance?” A week earlier, seven House Democrats—known as floor managers, in impeachment argot—had marched across the long axis of the Capitol, past statues of Brigham Young and Barry Goldwater, and delivered two articles of impeachment to the floor of the Senate. Hakeem Jeffries, a floor manager from New York, told me later that the experience of passing from one chamber to the other was “what it must feel like when a home team is playing in a game at someone else’s stadium.” The feeling was well warranted: just about every aspect of the trial—the amount of time the managers would have to present, the kind and quantity of evidence they could use, even the scope of press access—would be controlled by Senate Republicans, which was to say, in large part, by Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader. What’s more, the official task confronting the managers, to persuade sixty-seven out of a hundred senators to remove the President from office, was, as everyone had recognized from the start, all but impossible.

And yet, the staffer’s family back home could be forgiven for thinking that the House Democrats had reason for some modest optimism. In the hours before the trial proceedings got under way in earnest, on January 21st, McConnell had been forced by moderate members of his caucus to backtrack from a proposal that would have provided just two days for the managers to present their case. On that first day, the managers had also been able to take advantage of a series of procedural amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, to start arguing the substance of their case, in a way that had clearly seemed to catch the White House lawyers, sent to the Senate to defend the President, off guard. The staffer recognized these minor victories but quickly set his sibling straight. “No,” he wrote back. “This is the Alamo. There’s only one outcome here.”

This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House’s impeachment efforts. As recently as July—coincidentally, on the same day that Donald Trump had his now infamous call with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky—Adam Schiff, the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, said that he would “be delighted” if there was a real prospect of removing the President through impeachment. Unfortunately, he said at the time, “the only way he’s leaving office, at least at this point, is by being voted out⁠.” For his part, Jerry Nadler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told me more recently that, though he believed that “on any rational basis, the President should be removed from office,” he had no illusions about the possibility of such an event occurring. “I’m cynical,” he said. “I didn’t believe the Republicans would give a damn.”

The minimal odds of convicting Trump did not stop many House Democrats from seeing the chance to serve as a floor manager as intensely attractive. But they also understood, like aspiring popes, that grasping too openly for the position would not help their cause. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her selection of the managers, a few hours before the articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate, several of them insisted that they had not lobbied to be chosen. Val Demings, for instance, a former police chief from Florida, told me that, during the meeting in which Pelosi told her that she would be a floor manager, the Speaker had first asked if she was even interested. “She had not heard from me,” Demings said. By all accounts, Pelosi kept her choice a closely held secret right up to the end. Schiff—whom she has called her “general,” and whom she selected to be the lead floor manager for the trial—was one of the few people with whom she discussed the matter. Nadler, who had chaired a hearing about the constitutional standards for impeachment last fall—debates about which would loom large over the trial—was another. The remaining five managers were selected to make up a group that Pelosi hoped would reflect the diversity, in several dimensions, of the House Democratic caucus. Zoe Lofgren, of California, had seen two previous impeachment inquiries at close hand. Jeffries was recognized as one of the House’s more talented communicators. Demings was a member of both the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, which had given her a role in both major phases of the House impeachment inquiry. Sylvia Garcia, of Texas, was a freshman congresswoman and a former judge. Staffers working on the inquiry said that the one surprise on Pelosi’s list was Jason Crow, of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan but had not been on any of the committees conducting the impeachment inquiry.

The Laurel and Hardy–esque physical contrast between Schiff and Nadler, the team’s most senior members, could stand as a metaphor for their differing attitudes toward impeachment. Schiff had resisted calls to begin proceedings against Trump even after the release of the Mueller report, and had urged Pelosi last fall to keep the scope of the articles narrowly focussed on the Ukraine matter. Nadler, on the other hand, was an early advocate for impeachment. Last summer, a month before news of the Ukraine scheme had broken in the press, he told CNN that the Judiciary Committee was engaged in “formal impeachment proceedings,” a declaration that caused some consternation among his more cautious colleagues in the House. And, when we spoke during the trial, he confirmed to me, for the first time on the record, that he had pushed Pelosi, unsuccessfully, to include an article of impeachment dedicated to the obstruction-of-justice allegations in the Mueller report. “It was clear to me by the beginning of 2019 that, on the merits, he ought to be impeached,” Nadler said, of Trump. By December, when the actual articles were drawn up, he said, “we could have impeached him on a dozen, literally a dozen, different arguments. But there’s a prudential political judgment to be made in terms of which articles and how many, and that’s the judgment that Nancy”—Pelosi—“ultimately made. That’s not a judgment on values, on the merits. It was a judgment, ultimately, on which could be most easily explained.”

The House floor managers had three days to present their case against Trump. They would end up using nearly all of their allotted twenty-four hours, building their case out of a series of scripted modules. As a lawyer working on the impeachment told me, the aim of the presentation was to put together something like a closing argument in a typical criminal trial, “where you are weaving the evidence together—the text messages, the documents, the video, the argument—to show how it all meshes together⁠.”

From the start, the managers and the staff had been aware of the need to reach two audiences. One was the hundred senators in the chamber, who were forced to sit silently through eight hours of lectures each day, without smartphones or laptops to distract them. Lofgren, who knew many of the Republicans from earlier in their careers, when they had served in the House with her, said that she took special care to make eye contact with her former colleagues. “I’m looking at them, wondering what they’re thinking and how to speak to them,” she said. By far the more important audience, however, at least as far as the managers were concerned, was the public watching at home, who would not have the time or inclination to absorb hours of sometimes tedious presentations at a stretch. “In order to appeal to the broader public, you have to have some repetition,” the lawyer told me. “But that annoys the senators, who are sitting there listening to what they perceive, potentially, to be the same thing over and over.”