Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University. He has written books of varying critical reception on Russia and Eastern Europe. Lately, he has taken to warning Americans of what he sees as the danger the United States will fall into totalitarianism under President Trump. In the past few days, Snyder has turned his attention , not in a scholarly work but in a series of tweets, to a Trump impeachment trial in the Senate. His tweets were notable mostly because Snyder managed to pack a large number of misconceptions about impeachment into a very small space.

The tweets, ten in all, were directed toward Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell. McConnell has been majority leader since the GOP won control of the Senate in the 2014 election; he was most recently reelected (by acclamation among the Senate’s 53 GOP members) after the 2018 elections. It is perhaps too obvious to note that since the majority leader represents the majority, he exercises a lot of power and influence in the Senate. Nevertheless, Snyder began his critique with this: