As House impeachment managers and President Trump’s lawyers prepared for their closing arguments late Monday morning and a final vote on Wednesday, some Democratic senators had already shifted their focus from the trial to defeating Mr. Trump in the general election.
On CNN on Monday, Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, acknowledged that some of her Democratic colleagues might vote in favor of acquitting Mr. Trump. But she said the party has universal agreement on major issues like health care, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
“We agree on certain fundamental things that have to do with helping people instead as opposed to screwing them over,” she said.
Democratic presidential candidates will compete for the first time on Monday during the Iowa caucuses, a contest that often narrows the field for the party’s nomination.
Four of the 100 senators who sat in judgment of Mr. Trump are running for the Democratic nomination.
On many levels, President Trump’s weekend — full of golf, catered salmon and plenty of patriotic-themed evening wear — could have been devised to offer relief and a sense of triumph to a president who spent the first month of an election year watching from the sidelines as the Senate debated his future.
With his acquittal all but final, the president passed from table to table in the dining room of his golf club on Saturday quizzing his buddies on the 2020 election, at times lingering long enough to complain about his impeachment ordeal. By Saturday night, the president was in a more celebratory mood when he greeted the band of supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his private club.
Under a large illustration that depicted him dressed as a football player, Mr. Trump regaled them with his latest approval ratings — “We just had our best poll numbers that we’ve ever had,” he said to the group — and walked into the dining room to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” The song is played every time Mr. Trump takes the stage at one of his rallies, and Mr. Greenwood was performing it live for the special occasion.
“As usual, our president scored another victory,” Toni Kramer, the supporter who organized the party for him, said in an interview. “He won the Super Bowl of Washington.”
But that sense of celebration appeared to be fleeting as the evening went on and Mr. Trump’s anger over impeachment, and his antipathy toward his possible 2020 election opponents — in particular, Michael R. Bloomberg — spilled into public view. There were more pressing matters at hand, including the global spread of the coronavirus and his State of the Union address on Tuesday, but he made little mention of them.
Sunday night the president and Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a latecomer to the Democratic race who is not on the ballot in the Iowa caucuses on Monday, would face off in costly Super Bowl ads. But Mr. Trump, who seems to be increasingly fixated on Mr. Bloomberg and the fortune he is vowing to spend on the election, apparently could not wait.
Both sides hinted on Sunday at what could be part of their closing arguments. Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the lead House impeachment manager, rejected the argument made by Republican senators that Mr. Trump’s political fate should be decided in the 2020 election, stressing that the president has been charged with soliciting foreign interference in that same election.
“They need to remove him from office because he is threatening to still cheat in the next election by soliciting foreign interference,” Mr. Schiff said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And so the normal remedy for a president’s misconduct isn’t available here because the elections, he is already trying to prejudice and compromise with further foreign interference.”
Alan M. Dershowitz, a constitutional law scholar on Mr. Trump’s defense team, insisted that the charges presented by House Democrats were not impeachable offenses.
“If somebody were accused of the crime of ‘abuse of power’ or ‘dishonesty,’ something that’s not a crime, what you do is make a motion to dismiss,” Mr. Dershowitz said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The articles of impeachment did not charge an impeachable offense.”
What we’re expecting to see:
The impeachment managers and Mr. Trump’s lawyers are set to deliver their closing arguments.
When we’re likely to see it:
The Senate will reconvene for the trial at 11 a.m. Lawmakers will hear up to four hours of closing arguments, divided equally between impeachment managers and Mr. Trump’s lawyers.
How to follow it:
The New York Times’s congressional and White House teams will be following all the developments and streaming the trial live, on this page. Stay with us.
The days ahead:
Tuesday will bring a packed schedule on Capitol Hill. Senators will be given the opportunity to make floor speeches on the articles of impeachment. Mr. Trump will then deliver his State of the Union address to Congress later that evening, still technically under the cloud of a potential removal from office.
At 4 p.m. Wednesday, the trial will conclude with a vote on the articles of impeachment.