Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may be "fine" with the idea of never holding a Senate trial after the impeachment of Donald Trump, but you know who isn't—Donald Trump. Trump is just certain that a circus-like trial with lots of conspiracy-laced testimony will do wonders for him, restoring him to his former glory before he was besmirched by the stain of impeachment.
And while McConnell has been trying to tamp down expectations for a trial of any heft or meaning, Trump's external allies (likely reached by cell) have been egging him on, insisting that calling witnesses such as Hunter Biden and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff will really play to his strengths.
“We don’t want a quick technical acquittal but complete exoneration,” one of Trump's outside advisers told Politico. Because hurtling down a rabbit hole of baseless conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden is where Trump's holy grail of total exoneration lies.
What McConnell knows is that there's no way he has the 51 votes he needs to travel down that rabbit hole, no matter how much Trump wants it. And while McConnell is a brazen breaker of norms himself, he's also not a complete idiot—he knows Trump is so blatantly guilty of the charges leveled against him that the less the American people chew it over, the better.
Major Republican donor Dan Eberhart called the widening gulf between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue a "family feud.”
“I hope the White House agrees with us on bringing this thing to a conclusion, not dragging it out,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota.
But that's not exactly where Trump appears to be with things. As Trump seethed over his impeachment and the delay of his trial Thursday night, he tweeted, "The reason the Democrats don’t want to submit the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate is that they don’t want corrupt politician Adam Shifty Schiff to testify under oath, nor do they want the Whistleblower, the missing second Whistleblower, the informer, the Bidens, to testify!"