The January 6th Trial That Wasn’t has taken on the status of one of the great maddening what-ifs. And the fantasy of how it all might have gone down is easy enough to engage in. The judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan, had originally set a trial date of March 4, 2024. Imagine that day beginning with Trump and his lawyers arriving at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, in Washington, D.C., in a motorcade, with an overture of sirens. And imagine, in the weeks that followed, Mike Pence giving riveting testimony about Trump exhorting him to throw out the electoral votes of seven states; Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, recounting the January 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump told him to “find” eleven thousand votes; Rudy Giuliani falling apart when asked about the Trump team’s mustering of fake electoral certificates. And Trump would have to sit quietly as a jury of D.C. residents delivered its verdict. Maybe he’d be led off in handcuffs.