The following is a fictional “what if” scenario.

Day One — 9:00 a.m. | The House Floor

The vote to impeach Donald Trump has been building for six weeks — slowly at first, then all at once, the way these things always go. What breaks the dam is not a single scandal or a single crime but something more corrosive: exhaustion. Senior Republicans, men and women who have spent years bending their spines into shapes they no longer recognize, have simply stopped bending. A former MAGA congressman from Ohio — a man who once called Trump “the greatest president of my lifetime” on national television — casts the vote that puts the tally over the threshold and then sits very still at his desk while the chamber erupts around him.

The final House count: 241 to 194. Thirty-one Republicans cross the aisle. Trump is now the first and only president to have been impeached three times. The third time, many cable news commentators note, is the charm.

The articles travel to the Senate by courier, as tradition requires, carried by a small procession of House members who look like they are walking to something they cannot take back. Which they are.

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