3. A cinematic experience We now know that the House managers | Ivanka Trump

3. A cinematic experience
We now know that the House managers and Trump legal team will have 16 hours apiece — beginning on Wednesday — to make their most compelling case to the Senate. For Democrats, that means putting on a production heavy on the increasingly rich body of video evidence showing that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists took their cues from Trump, cited him as the reason they stormed the Capitol and viewed his remarks to them on that day as permission to confront lawmakers.

An underappreciated fact about the trial: The collection of evidence continues to build daily, with new court filings, social media snippets and videos taken by the rioters themselves surfacing in real time. Democrats plan to knit these together with Trump’s actual call on Jan. 6 for his supporters to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol. Several of the subsequent participants in the insurrection told judges on Monday that they viewed Trump’s words as authorization, and one even called him an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the subsequent violence.

Democrats used video to powerful effect in Trump’s first impeachment trial — mounting a case that relied on Trump’s own words and actions. This time, they’ll have hundreds of hours of footage to cull to demonstrate the effect of Trump’s words. Trump’s team, which was caught flat-footed last year by the House’s reliance on technology, has signaled its own plans to deploy videos, potentially from violent riots that plagued some American cities over the summer and of remarks from Democrats that they’ve described as inviting violence.