WASHINGTON – Late into the first night the proceedings got nasty and heated. The judge gently reminded: “Remember where you are.” Next day, the parties slumped in their chairs as accusations of bad faith and abusive behavior droned on: one side was led by a “cheat.” From outside the courtroom, that very “cheat” replied that his accusers were “major sleazebags.”

The Senate isn’t holding an impeachment trial so much as a divorce hearing – and not one of those “amicable” splits one hears of. There is no common ground. Democrats and Republicans live in separate universes. The differences are irreconcilable. “Deliberations” are little more than TV advertising. Senators talk past each other as they crawl toward a likely vote of acquittal imposed by Soviet-style party discipline. There will be nothing even a little bit sweet about this “Marriage Story.”

It looks like Donald Trump, a difficult dad if there ever was one, will get custody. Until at least Jan. 20, 2021. At noon.

This divorce court trial is evidence and emblem of the divided state of the nation as the 2020 campaign officially begins. Every public opinion poll reveals Americans’ glumness about the future, showing the country is more divided culturally and politically than at any point since the 1960s or, some have argued, the 1860s.

Yet, the Senate impeachment charade also is a foretaste of the election debate we should have – need to have – about the nature of our government itself. Is Donald Trump, in all his bullying outrageousness, the street muscle we need in a tribal age? Or is his callousness toward the U.S. Constitution actually the gravest threat we face?

The divisions are vividly on display in the Senate. The studious and articulate Rep. Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, is the beau ideal of the coastal, credentialed America that has run the upper reaches of the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. Schiff offers himself as a paragon of law and learning. Originally wary of an impeachment, he reversed course when he learned of President Trump’s now-infamous July 25 Ukraine phone call. When he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about it, according to two senior congressional sources, she said that the news was “a gift.”

It’s not clear whether Pelosi meant the “gift” would allow her to unify her caucus – it more or less did – or whether it meant she now thought Trump had been caught doing something so egregious that he could and should be removed.

In any event, she decided to move – fast.

Schiff and his fellow House impeachment managers have laid out a comprehensive case, even without new witnesses, that the president tried to use military aid to strong-arm the Ukraine president into helping him compromise the political viability of the Democrats’ 2020 presidential frontrunner. In other words, to help him win reelection. The presentation, complete with videos and slides, was artfully constructed to be seen and shown on TV and streaming video.

Some Republicans believe the president’s conduct isn’t impeachable. Others think that even if it might have been, it’s not prudent – or proper – to oust a sitting president on the eve of his reelection campaign. Most are annoyed, at least, that the House didn’t first go to the courts to enforce its subpoenas, although they conveniently ignore Trump’s imperious, peremptory block on any testimony to begin with. But all of them fear what Trump would do to them if they were to defy him.

Schiff’s opposite number is the shrewd, mordantly remorseless Mitch McConnell, GOP majority leader from ruby red Kentucky, which Trump won by 30 points. Up for reelection this year (he’s heavily favored), McConnell’s fundraising appeals portray him as an unassuming paragon of the forgotten American, the victim of attacks by “liberal Hollywood elites.”

An Alabama native, McConnell is no Ivy scholar. But the country cousin schtick is a bit much. He brags, justifiably, that he has used his role in the Senate to put more judges – certified conservatives – on the federal bench than any Senate leader in U.S. history. McConnell knows he has the votes to block conviction (two-thirds would be required). He sees his task as making the trial look at least minimally kosher, and as such a way to protect Trump and the GOP this November.

Will that require McConnell to allow new witnesses? “We need four Republicans, and I’m afraid it is not likely,” said Sen. Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They’re caught between McConnell and Trump’s avalanche of tweets. I have no idea what is in the Republicans’ minds.”

Democrats don’t know, but Republicans do. Some of them like Trump, some fear him, but they all despise the same folks and forces he does – and that includes Schiff. GOP voters buy Trumpism: the my-way-or-the-highway, money-is-everything, I-love-evangelicals crusade against regulators, liberals, seculars, media, most government and the darker, non-Norwegian “They.”

The 2020 campaign will be about how Democrats respond.

The temper of the times, embodied and amplified by Trump, would seem to marginalize Americans in the middle. It’s the rare former vice president who isn’t a lock for his party’s nomination, but Joe Biden isn’t. Any number of obscure moderates already have become middle-of-the-roadkill. Unflappable Pete Buttigieg has been having a moment, as is the relentlessly sunny Sen. Amy Klobuchar, to a lesser degree.

But the latest polls and spending reports, taken together, show some momentum for two widely different versions of a new domineering spirit on the left. One is Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is full of sweeping condemnations of a different “They” – billionaires and corporations – and who wants to enact a vast agenda of European-style, government-controlled activism on health care, the environment and taxes.

Mike Bloomberg, a technocrat and former New York mayor who is one of the world’s wealthiest men, offers himself in an unprecedented rush of ads as a kind of benign Good Trump: the one and only guy who can heal America and get us the health care and everything else we need because he is too rich to be corrupt, of selfish or any of the other bad things that politicians have always been. To coin a phrase: he alone can fix it.

Where have we heard that before?