Washington: Hair dye was not running down Bruce Castor’s face as he made the opening argument for Donald Trump’s defence in his Senate impeachment trial.
But his embarrassing performance managed to rival Rudy Giuliani’s infamous November press conference in which a suspicious dark liquid began dripping down his cheek as the Trump lawyer made laughable claims of voter fraud.
As bad as Giuiliani’s performance was, he was speaking to a bunch of reporters. Castor was addressing the 100 US senators who will decide whether Trump should be convicted of inciting a deadly insurrection and disqualified from holding public office again.
Bruce Castor, lawyer for former US president Donald Trump, speaks during the second impeachment trial of Trump in the Senate at the US Capitol in Washington.Credit:Senate TV/AP
Castor’s opening address to the Senate on Wednesday (AEDT) was rambling, incoherent and cringe-worthy. The speech was so disjointed that it’s difficult to extract any meaningful quotes from it. “Nebraska is quite a judicial-thinking place,” was one of Castor’s more memorable lines.
He repeatedly went out of his way to praise his Democratic adversaries – something you could never imagine his client doing. And appeared to concede that Trump had lost the election to Biden – again, something that was utterly un-Trumpian.
The least surprising revelation of the day was that Trump, watching from his home in Florida, was yelling at his television screen in fury as Castor spoke. He must have wondered whether he should have stuck with the defence team he fired just a week earlier.
Hair dye runs down the face of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Guiliani during a press conference in November. Credit:AP
For all Trump’s flaws, he understands what makes for compelling television – and Castor’s presentation was compelling only in the manner of a car crash. It was the legal equivalent of the recent movie adaptation of Cats: so badly-executed that it became unintentionally, and hilariously, captivating.
Dressed in an oversized pinstripe suit, the former Pennsylvania attorney-general meandered across an array of topics except the one supposedly at hand: whether it is constitutional to convict a former president of committing high crimes and misdemeanours.
His performance was so inept that Newsmax, the fiercely pro-Trump alternative to Fox News, cut away for analysis from constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
“There is no argument,” Dershowitz marvelled. “I have no idea what he’s doing. I have no idea why he’s saying what he’s saying!”
Donald Trump watched the opening defence argument at his Senate impeachment trial from his home in Florida.Credit:Bloomberg
And there was emotion, when Raskin – whose 25-year-old son recently died – broke down in tears as he said his daughter no longer felt safe to visit the Capitol.
The fact the prosecution team so clearly outshone Trump’s defence lawyers would have been hugely consequential if they were speaking to an impartial jury. But they weren’t. They were addressing the deeply partisan US Senate, where almost everyone has already made up their mind on Trump’s guilt or innocence.
The Senate voted 56-44 to uphold the constitutionality of the trial – almost exactly the same result as when the Senate voted 55-45 on an identical question last month.
That means just six Republican senators consider the trial process constitutional – well below the 17 required to join Democrats to achieve the numbers needed to convict Trump.
Day one of the Senate trial was a humiliating spectacle for Trump and his legal team, but they remain on track for an acquittal.
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