The Senate will reconvene on Saturday morning, when members are expected to vote on whether to convict Trump Day four of a trial, which has an all but guaranteed outcome.

Yet its participants push on.

It was time for Donald Trump's legal team to make their defense on lay out why the former president shouldn't be convicted.

The article of impeachment now before the Senate, is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance.

Their argument focused on freedom of speech, insisting Trump was exercising his First Amendment rights when casting doubt on the election results.

The Constitution in the First Amendment must certainly apply to these impeachment proceedings, and Mr Trump's speech deserves full protection under the First Amendment With Defense also showed a 10 minute video off Democrats using the word fight to argue that Trump's words off fight like hell on January 6 did not incite the rioters who attacked the capital afterwards.

Suddenly, the word fight is off limits sparrows, the hypocrisy and false indignation.

The defense team's statements followed two days of arguments by Democrat prosecutors, who said Trump set the stage for the violence of January 6.

They said he summoned the crowd toe Washington and did nothing to stop the rioting, even as a played out on television.

This is about protecting our republic and articulating and defining the standards of presidential conduct.

And if you want this to be a standard for totally appropriate presidential conduct going forward, be my guest.

But we're headed for a very different kind of country at that point, Mr President.

The Democrats are unlikely to gain a conviction as few Republican senators have come out against Trump, who remains popular among Republican voters.

Both parties are eager to move to a final vote, which could come as soon as Saturday.

But all signs point to an ending as a partisan draw on the second acquittal for Donald Trump.

What they're doing and for more on this, I'm joined by D.

W reporter William Blue Croft, William.

One thing I'd like to understand the defense was given 16 hours to make its case, but it took less than four.

I mean, what does that mean?

Well, Democrats, House managers, the prosecution in their time also didn't take their entire 16 hours a lot of.

But they did take Mawr than the three or four hours that we saw yesterday from the defense.

I mean, it basically says that they don't think very highly of this trial.

They want to get it over with.

They know that the outcome is pretty much assured.

They don't have to mount a very strong defense to get Republicans to vote with them and therefore acquit Donald Trump.

And also remember, there were repeated shakeups in the Trump legal team, so that probably affected planning and organization and just who was doing what.

Really.

The effort was very clearly reflected by how poorly they did in that first time around.

Even Donald Trump was reported to have been outraged at how weak their original defense was, and you could hear in.

There's much stronger, more muscular defense yesterday, very much with having Donald Trump watching this and many of its supporters in mind when they went through their points on and how overall once the defense got going, did their arguments compared to the prosecution's Do you think?

Well, Democrats, the House managers, they laid out a very long, consistent case, not just on January 6, but in the weeks leading up to it.

In fact, all of Donald Trump's term in office, where he repeatedly used rhetoric that was stoking this kind of violence in this kind of anger that we saw erupt on January 6th and the defense Onley focused on January 6th, Onley on that one speech, the fight like hell speech just before the mob attacked the capital.

Now that was part of the article of impeachment that Democrats are arguing that they brought Trump to try Alon.

But that is not the entirety of their case, and the defense just ignored all of these other points that they were making.

They made quite a What about is, um, case drawing a false equivalency between Trump's actions and words and other instances in different context of Democrats and liberals doing much much the same thing, but in completely different context and not not really explaining what that context wa?

So it was a very much a cherry picked kind of kind of defense that left a lot of people scratching their heads what it was really about.

Okay, Well, listen, we're expecting a vote today, Largely along party lines.

It looks like a foregone conclusion.

The Republicans will vote to acquit.

Is there anything else to look for?

Yeah.

I mean, we know we're unlikely to see 17 Republican senators join Democrats to convict Trump.

So the question is, how many will we know?

5 to 6 Republican senators voted to have this trial take place, so we could maybe expect to see five or six Republican senators vote to convict.

It could beam Or will it be 10?

Will be 12 will be eight.

That will be interesting.

The ultimate number and as well as who is voting to convict Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate leader of the Republicans.

Formally, the leader of the Senate on a huge enabler of Donald Trump over all these years has really distanced himself from Donald Trump and his left it very open is the how he's going to vote will be very, very interesting to see if he ultimately votes to convict or not.

And then what?

That means for the Republican Party going forward.

All right, we'll be watching that closely.

Thank you, William.