Trump Attorney Bruce Castor’s Rambling Impeachment Trial Speech Made Everyone Think About ‘My Cousin Vinny’

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial got off to a predictably surreal start on Tuesday thanks to Bruce Castor Jr., an attorney representing the former president who delivered the defense’s opening statement. Trump went through five lawyer before settling on Castor and his colleague, David Schoen, who’ve been tasked with defending someone who’s even being denounced by QAnon Shaman. And yet many were still surprised with a speech that rambled for over an hour with little focus, and was even filled with things that undoubtedly drove Trump nuts.

“I’ll be quite frank with you, we changed what we were going to do on account that we thought the House managers’ presentation was well done,” Castor admitted at one point, and praising the lawyers trying to convict Trump was just the tip of the iceberg. Castor, for some reason, spent a lot of time praising the senators. He called Nebraska “quite a judicial thinking place.” He even actually admitted Trump lost the election, then dared the DOJ to arrest him.

It was such a confounding hour that even die-hard Trumpists like Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax, “I have no idea what he’s doing.”

To others, an unfocused, spluttering opening statement got people thinking about something else: Austin Pendleton’s stage-struck public defender who represents one of the defendants in the 1991 comedy fave My Cousin Vinny.

https://twitter.com/BayouRising/status/1359213740969885700

The comparison was apt: After all, it was also Vinny star Joe Pesci’s birthday.

There were plenty of other jokes about Castor’s performance as well.

At the end of the day, the Senate voted to hear the trial out, so this probably won’t be the last time we’re put to sleep by Mr. Castor. In the meantime, My Cousin Vinny streams with a Cinemax Go subscription. And happy birthday, Joe Pesci!