republicans don't believe a darn thing democrats say and we'll survive that tribalism tonight and survive it when he's acquitted in the senate. what happens when we wake up and there's an emergency or a crisis and these two american political silos which don't interact anymore except to clash would be expected to combine and tell us the truth and say, we're going to preserve the country in this way? to me, knowing how this historic moment is going to turn out gives me some comfort but what gives me no comfort is whether they could combine efforts if we had a true emergency. >> if only we had a presidential historian here. jeffrey engel, on this historic day, good to have you here. >> i keep thinking about benjamin franklin in the sense when he was talking about impeachment at the constitutional convention, he made the point that the president, any president, should actually welcome the idea of impeachment because what's the alternative. historically franklin said the alternative was assassination. so if you have someone you don't like politically, that's how you dealt with it. franklin said this is part of a