A confederacy of dunces stumbled onto the Senate floor this week to launch its bewildering defence of President Donald Trump. This misfit band of lawyers brought with it arguments so stunningly stupefying, logic so fatally flawed and a cynicism so brazenly transparent that one suspects Baghdad Bob was viewing the entire spectacle with grudging respect.

On Day One of Trump’s impeachment defence, his team dismissed his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani as a minor player in the Ukrainian affair. Trump lawyer Jane Raskin said he was little more than a “shiny object designed to distract you”. Never mind that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to contact Giuliani, assuring him that “Mr Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you.”

Before Trump made the call that would eventually lead to his impeachment, Giuliani ran frequent strategy sessions from the second floor of the president’s Washington hotel that were focused on getting Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani repeatedly pressured US diplomats and State Department employees to push his “drug deal” (as former national security adviser John Bolton described it).

At the same time, America’s Mayor kept feeding Trump a steady diet of conspiracy theories that played into the president’s pre-existing prejudices against Ukraine. Far from being a bit player, Giuliani helped build the Democrats’ case for Trump’s impeachment better than anyone else in the president’s inner circle.

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Senators were also forced to endure Ken Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment”. Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving president Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president”.

If it is true that Trump killed irony years ago, Starr’s opening statement single-handedly exhumed irony’s corpse from its tomb and dragged it across the Senate floor. That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster”.

Such insults were never thrown in the direction of Pam Bondi, another member of the president’s legal team. Bondi had safely placed herself in Trump’s good favour by refusing to pursue claims of fraud against Trump University when she was Florida’s attorney general.

In 2013, the ‘Orlando Sentinel’ reported Bondi’s office was deciding whether to join in the lawsuit against Trump. Four days later, Bondi’s re-election efforts were boosted by a $25,000 check from Trump’s foundation. Soon after, Bondi announced she would be not suing the reality TV star.

Such shamelessness in the service of Trump carries with it certain benefits. For Bondi, it was the honour of trotting out the conspiracy theory that then-vice president Joe Biden had a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for investigating Burisma, of whose board his son Hunter was a member.

If it were possible to embarrass Bondi, she would be distressed to learn the ‘Wall Street Journal’ dismissed her theory as “discredited” months ago, or that the EU, the Obama administration and the US’s closest allies demanded the ouster of the same investigator, in part because his investigation into Burisma had been shelved. (© Washington Post)

Joe Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Florida

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