Riding on a train to Maine across a blanket of snow, as if on a sleigh, I listened to the Speaker of the House read from the Declaration of Independence. Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would begin drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump. The sun glinted off the metal roofs of each station stop, in spots where the snow had melted.

Pelosi mentioned her sorrow. “Sadly,” she said, her voice rasping with what sounded like a winter cold, “but with confidence and humility, with allegiance to our Founders and a heart full of love for America, today I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.” And she sounded sad, too, or at least weary. It can be hard to tell, especially listening without watching.

Stands of pine and hemlock flashed by the train window, trees dusted with white, like so many green gumdrops plopped in the frosting-made snow outside a gingerbread house. Sorrow, confidence, humility, love. I looked for a photograph online: Pelosi wore a white suit. I worry about the love and the white suit—suffragist white, the costume of absolutism. Hillary Clinton, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, wore a white suit, too. Delegates waved printed signs that read “Love trumps hate,” a slogan that might at first have seemed to invoke and celebrate the long struggle and triumph of the marriage-equality movement but had in fact been devised by a corporate branding firm hired by Hillary for America. White balloons fell from the ceiling, a blizzard, and red ones, too, as if it were Valentine’s Day.

The red outside my window was the red of bricks, factory buildings alongside each train depot, icicles dangling from the edges of their slate roofs, the red of the factory chimneys from which no smoke rises. “Let us begin where our Founders began, in 1776,” Pelosi said. It was summer then. June, July, sweltering in that city of love, in another building made of brick.

The train slowed as it wound past a river, nearly frozen, a blue deepening to black. The George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that everything came down to the matter of madness. The madness of anger, the madness of insanity, the madness of impeachment itself. “I get it—you’re mad,” he told the representatives. “The President’s mad. My Republican friends are mad. My Democratic friends are mad. My wife is mad. My kids are mad. Even my dog seems mad, and Luna’s a goldendoodle, and they don’t get mad. So we’re all mad. Where has that taken us?”

The train stopped under a stone bridge, a beautiful arch, it looked like a New Deal bridge, built by masons working for the W.P.A., now not much short of a century ago. It stands in need of repair. It is a terrible thing to watch a nation and a people fall apart. I am tired both of hearing Republicans talk about how mad they are (Mad about the witnesses! Mad about the media! Mad about the chairs in the House chamber!) and of hearing Democrats talk about how sad they are (It is a sober day! This is my sombre duty!), as if even emotions are partisan. Republicans hate, Democrats love: those were the battle lines that Democratic political consultants and corporate branding and design teams urged their candidates to draw in 2016. It was bad politics then, and it is bad politics now—political mush, political mash, political slush. Republicans use it as a ploy. “Do you hate the President?” a reporter for a conservative media outlet hollered to Pelosi at the end of the press conference. The Speaker said she resented the use of the word, citing her religion and a “heart full of love.” “I don’t hate anyone,” she said. “She hates,” Trump tweeted, with seeming glee, as if he had caught her out, as if all of this, the wretchedness of his Administration, the scale of this constitutional crisis, the strength of the case for impeachment, came down to a woman’s feelings.

Read More Susan B. Glasser on the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation of the President.

Further north, the rivers were frozen into a cloudy gray. To witness this moment in history is to lie deep beneath the surface of that ice, peering up in the dismal bleakness. American historians have been asked for so long, by so many people, so many times, in so many ways: Is this President really that bad? Is this unprecedented? Almost always, I bite my tongue. But, yes, he is that bad, and this is unprecedented, and these acts are impeachable, and, if it seems as though people have been clamoring for his impeachment since he took office, that’s only because he has behaved abominably since he took office. Is abomination impeachable? No. But the abuses of office of which the President now stands accused are the very definition of impeachable.

The madness lies in looking, honestly, at how this came to pass, at how many people had to give up on the idea of democracy for things to come to this. The sadness lies in the recognizing of the unlikelihood of anything getting much better anytime soon, what with the slush and the sleet and the coming storm. A farmer walks across a field, bracing against the wind. Hardness is what’s required to get through a political winter: determination, forbearance, sacrifice, not bitterness but a certain sternness.

No one else on the train, as far as I could see, was watching Pelosi or reading the news. It was cold. The conductor said that the heat was on the fritz. Huddled in winter parkas, bundled in scarves, we stared out the windows, shivering, shuddering.