Following the maxims laid down by his attorney and mentor, the late Roy Cohn, he’s brushed aside the truth, he’s brushed aside the letter of the law, he’s refused to apologize, and he’s launched counterattack after counterattack. “Where's my Roy Cohn?” Trump bellowed early in his presidency when Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed to protect him from his enemies. Little did Trump know that like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the power he sought was always inside him. He’s his own Roy Cohn.

As successful as Trump has been at winning this pot with a handful of jokers, he shouldn’t apply the lesson to every case. A Senate impeachment trial isn’t a criminal trial, as Ann E. Marimow writes in the Washington Post. If the Senate convicts you, you lose your job, but you don't go to jail. Your jurors are U.S. senators, not the man in the street. The chief justice of the United States is your judge, but he’s largely a procedural puppet. And the senators aren’t bound by the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards of a criminal trial.

You’ll catch hell from some quarters for saying impeachment is a political process not a legal one—mostly because it plays into Trump’s worldview. But no matter how much constitutional high-mindedness you attempt to slather on impeachment, the end result is less about the president’s legal accountability and more about his political strength. Flexing political muscle until he rips his monogrammed shirts, Trump held the needed majority of senators from his party to block essential witnesses, evidence and documents from the proceedings. Meanwhile, the Senate has allowed Trump’s lead lawyer, Pat Cipollone, to lie flagrantly about Republicans being banned from the House SCIF. That’s politics, not jurisprudence.

The ease of the Trump strategy is that it requires him to think only two steps ahead at a time, which is about his limit. It’s only when you start thinking in three-step increments that things turn dicey for Trump. The long-term effects of Trump’s lies about the Ukraine affair—which he continues to tell on the path to acquittal—have yet to be realized. (See this Daniel Dale piece on the dozen Ukraine-related fibs he told Wednesday in a single Davos news conference. “Now, with me, there's no lying,” Trump actually said.) Trump expects to collect nothing but dividends from ballot boxes in November for his legal strategy. But Trump is not the only candidate on the ballot.

Trump’s Kevlar works for him, but it isn’t magic, and its protection rarely extends to his allies. In the 2018 midterms, Trump’s stumping for other Republicans failed to prevent steep gains by Democrats, most notably in their takeover of the House of Representatives. In 2020, at least four Republican senatorial incumbents—Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—have real contests on their hands. If Trump beats back conviction in the Senate—as we expect him to—the Democrats will hang the Ukrainian mess around these candidates’ necks for helping to exonerate him. If they all lose, Trump’s triumph in the Senate will ultimately have weakened Trump’s hold on the upper chamber.

But that’s thinking four steps ahead, something the brilliant legal strategist Trump has proved incapable of doing.

******

The writer who is his own editor has a fool for a client. Send editorial advice via email to [email protected]. My email alerts edit my Twitter feed and my Twitter feed edits my email alerts. My RSS feed remains in limbo, unedited, unread, unacquitted.