A year later Trump is a dramatically diminished figure - an election loser who no longer dominates the national conversation after being banned from Twitter.

But Trump’s second impeachment trial appears destined to end just as his first did - in acquittal - despite broad agreement his behaviour after the November election was more reprehensible than his pressure campaign on Ukraine.

While some Democrats are publicly holding out hope that Trump may be convicted and subsequently banned from running again, that prospect looks increasingly unlikely with each passing day.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell generated a lot of excitement among progressives last week when he said that Trump had “provoked” the Capitol riot. He has also reportedly told confidantes that he is done with Trump and believes he committed impeachable offences.

But there’s no sign that McConnell’s frustration has opened the floodgates for Republicans to vote to convict Trump - or even that McConnell will necessarily do so himself when the moment comes.

When framing the constitution, America’s founders set an extremely high bar to convict and remove a president from office.

While the House of Representatives could impeach a president with a simple majority vote, a two-thirds “super-majority” in the Senate would need to vote in favour of conviction.

This means that, if all 50 Democratic senators vote to convict Trump they would need to be joined by a further 17 Senate Republicans in order to achieve their goal. A subsequent vote - using simple majority rules - could then be held to bar Trump from running from public office again and to deny him his post-presidential perks.

Most Republican senators are arguing against convicting Trump on procedural grounds - a strategy that allows them to remain on side with the party’s conservative base without having to defend Trump’s actions.

Some, like Texas Senator John Cornyn, say it is unconstitutional to convict a president once they leave office - a claim disputed by most constitutional experts.

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“Could we go back and try president Obama?” Cornyn asked the Associated Press, adding he believed that Trump had already been sufficiently punished by the voters. “One way in our system you get punished is losing an election,” he said.

Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday (AEDT) pushed back on Republican claims that it would be pointless or unconstitutional to convict Trump given he is no longer president.

“The theory that the Senate can’t try former officials would amount to a constitutional get-out-of-jail-free card for any president,” Schumer told the Senate.

But his argument is not resonating with the Republicans he needs to win over.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio has called the trial “stupid” and “unproductive” while colleague Tom Cotton said: “I think a lot of Americans are going to think it’s strange that the Senate is spending its time trying to convict and remove from office a man who left office a week ago.”

Romney, again, is standing out as an outlier in his willingness to vote to convict Trump. “I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offence,” he said over the weekend. “If not, what is?“

It’s possible to imagine a handful of Romney’s moderate colleagues - like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski - voting to convict Trump. But while surprises are always possible, the magic number of 17 defections seems to be out of reach.