As the Senate trial of Donald Trump gets underway, I wanted to note yet another reason for his impeachment that may or may not get its proper due in the Democrats’ prosecution of their case. A few weeks ago, shortly before the House voted to impeach Donald Trump for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made an argument for a strong, separate reason for Trump’s impeachment: his hours-long refusal to call off his supporters from their Capitol assault, or to authorize additional federal forces to intervene. Marshall notes a chilling but essential fact: “He refused because he liked what he was seeing.”

As I’ve written before, the spectacle of politicians calling on Donald Trump to call off his supporters captured the true horror of the moment. These calls reflected immediate, widespread acknowledgment that the attackers constituted an insurrectionist army headed by Trump, and Trump’s eventual decision to make a feeble attempt to rein them in was the president’s tacit acknowledgment of his generalship. But, as Marshall indirectly reminds us, Trump was simultaneously still the U.S. commander-in-chief, upon whom the country relied to authorize its own defense. This was obviously not a tenable reality — you can’t be the defender and destroyer of a country at the same time — but thinking about Trump’s dual role that day, as acknowledged even by his political supporters, helps provide another dimension to the depravity of his actions. There is even a sort of dark paradox when you look at it in this light — the moment he acknowledged being de facto head of an insurrectionist assault, his role as commander-in-chief of the United States was no longer comprehensible, and the fact that the nation had to wait for his say-so to get proper reinforcements into action, while necessary from the perspective of our constitutional order, made zero sense from the perspective of logic or common sense. In inciting insurrection, he ceased to be our president.