Last week the US Senate held a farce, a charade, a masked ball. Senators came, GOP lawyers came, and Democrats came dressed up and pretended to be lawyers, but were exposed as a junior high school debate team on a lark.

What can we learn from this debacle?

1. Donald Trump isn’t going anywhere- Like him or not, he is a force of nature. The only thing that will stop him is death, and then his kids will take over. This is a reality because he has remade the majority of the Republican Party into a populist group that is loyal to himself and his populist nostrums. He will be on the stump in the 2022 midterms primarying his GOP political opponents like Liz Cheney. He will take some of those scalps and will take sole credit if Republicans take back the House. After that, who knows?

2. Democrats are driven by hysterical emotions, not much else- This impeachment was another football held out for Charlie Brown Democrats, with Mitch McConnell playing Lucy. It was a loser from the start, as the Democrats were never going to get 67 votes to convict in the Senate. But plowed on they did and then embarrassed themselves with sob sister stories, maudlin posturing, and crybaby antics. It’s as if Nancy Pelosi has a mentally disturbed blind spot when it comes to Trump, causing her to impeach. Inner smart Nancy tells her it’s a trap that will only get Trump exonerated again. However, insane hysterical rubber room Nancy is the Commissioner Dreyfus to Trump’s Clouseau. That Nancy tells her, between eye twitches, that Trump must be chased down to the gates of hell and then some, regardless of the cost to her party or the country. Republicans like Commissioner Dreyfus Nancy very much.

3. When you say you want witnesses, call witnesses- The Democrat climb down on witnesses was a serious ouch moment. All the GOP had to do was bluff them with a patently non-serious threat to call hundreds of witnesses and they folded like a cheap card table. Not ready for prime time at all.

4. Choose your lawyers carefully- The Democrats had their moments. Raskin, Neguse, Dean, and Lieu were occasionally persuasive. The others, meh. But on the other side it was a cornucopia of professional instability. You had Van der Veen, who was gang busters, really nailed the Democrats. You had Schoen, who was a bit pedantic, but generally good. And then you had Castor. Who let that guy near a camera? Didn’t they have some kind of rehearsal process and thus could see that Castor was not ready for the show? Couldn’t they see he was just winging it? Apparently not, because they let him play with the pros and the result was not beneficial to the former president. In fact, it was bizarre, rambling, and incoherent. But at least it provided entertainment, which is more than can be said for much of the trial.