Analysis: Looming impeachment trial renews trauma of the Trump years

But the fact that many television viewers have now seen it unfold three times in just over 20 years is testimony to a polarized age.

And the sight of impeachment managers wearing black masks offered an almost medieval mood to a foreboding slice of history and hinted at the national pandemic crisis unfolding outside the Capitol -- which forms another dark dimension to Trump's legacy.

What was most strange was that the president who is the subject of the Constitution-based ouster attempt was not up the road in the White House.

And he is besmirched by the historic stain of a double impeachment.

Another odd wrinkle of history is that the impeached president's successor, Joe Biden, is already in the White House, seeking to heal Americans and the nation's divides and rolling out policies at a rapid clip -- like any other new commander in chief cursed by Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days yardstick.

Biden's sheer conventionality has made the events of the Trump presidency seem more distant than they actually are.

The chief justice -- apparently citing the fact that Trump is no longer in the White House -- obviously has no desire to make his own dubious history by presiding over two presidential trials.

The absence of many Republicans reflects the awful choices that the former president, has yet again, inflicted on his party.