WASHINGTON (AP) — Closing out their case, House Democrats warned Friday in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that the president will persist in abusing his power and endangering American democracy unless Congress intervenes to remove him before the 2020 election.

“He is who he is,” declared Rep. Adam Schiff, the
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He told the senators
listening as jurors that Trump put the U.S-Ukraine relationship on the
line in a way that benefited Russia just so he could take a political
“cheap shot” at Democratic foe Joe Biden.

“You cannot leave a man like that in office,” Schiff said. “You know it’s not going to stop. … It’s not going to stop unless the Congress does something about it.”

• The impeachment trial will resume at 2 p.m. Saturday on WISHTV.com and on the WISH-TV app and Facebook page.

The
Democratic prosecutors ended their presentation just before 9 p.m. EST,
with Schiff in the well of the Senate making one final plea to senators
to ensure witnesses are called to testify.

“Give America a fair trial,” Schiff said. “She’s worth it.”

Trump
is being tried in the Senate after the House impeached him last month,
accusing him of abusing his office by asking Ukraine for politically
motivated probes of Biden and other matters while withholding military
aid from a U.S. ally that was at war with bordering Russia. A second
article of impeachment accuses him of obstructing Congress by refusing
to turn over documents or allow officials to testify in the House
ensuing probe.

As Democrats finished their third day before
skeptical Republican senators, Trump’s legal team prepared to start his
defense, expected on Saturday. Trump, eyes on the audience beyond the
Senate chamber, bemoaned the schedule in a tweet, saying “looks like my
lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death
Valley in T.V.”

Said Trump attorney Jay Sekulow: “We’re going to rebut and refute, and we’re going to put on an affirmative case tomorrow.”

Republicans
are defending Trump’s actions as appropriate and are casting the
impeachment trial as a politically motivated effort to weaken him in his
reelection campaign. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate,
and eventual acquittal is considered likely.

Before that, senators
will make a critical decision next week on Democratic demands to hear
testimony from top Trump aides, including acting chief of staff Mick
Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton who refused to
appear before the House. It would take four Republican senators to join
the Democratic minority to seek witnesses, and so far the numbers
appear lacking.

“This needs to end,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump confidant.

With
Chief Justice John Roberts presiding, Friday’s session opened with a
sweeping and impassioned argument from Democrats that Trump’s actions
with Ukraine were not unique but part of a pattern of “destructive
behavior” now threatening the core foundations of American democracy.

Schiff
told the senators that Trump has shown repeatedly that he is willing to
put his personal political interests above those of the country he is
sworn to protect.

The evidence shows, he said, that Trump bucked
the advice of his own national security apparatus to chase “kooky”
theories about Ukraine pushed by lawyer Rudy Giuliani, resulting in “one
hell of a Russian intelligence coup” that benefited Vladimir Putin at
U.S. expense.

This was not simply a foreign policy dispute, Schiff
argued, but a breech of long-held American values for Trump to leverage
an ally — in this case Ukraine, a struggling democracy facing down
Russian troops — for the investigations he wanted ahead of 2020.

When
the House started investigating his actions, Democrats said, Trump
blatantly obstructed the probe. Even then-President Richard Nixon, they
argued, better understood the need to comply with Congress in some of
its oversight requests.

Schiff said that left unchecked Trump, who insists he did nothing wrong, would seek foreign election interference again.

Drawing
on historical figures, from the Founding Fathers to the late GOP Sen.
John McCain and the fictional Atticus Finch, Schiff made his arguments
emphatically personal.

“The next time, it just may be you,” he
said, pointing at one senator after another. “Do you think for a moment
that if he felt it was in his interest, he wouldn’t ask you to be
investigated?”

The senators though, appear as deeply divided as
the nation, with Democrats ready to vote to convict the president and
Republicans poised to acquit.

The impeachment trial is set against
the backdrop of the 2020 election, as voters assess Trump’s presidency
and his run for a second term. Four senators who are Democratic
presidential candidates are off the campaign trail, seated as jurors.

A
new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research showed the public slightly more likely to say the Senate should
convict and remove Trump from office than to say it should not, 45% to
40%. But a sizable percentage, 14%, said they didn’t know enough to have
an opinion.

One issue with wide agreement: Trump should allow top
aides to appear as witnesses at the trial. About 7 in 10 respondents
said so, including majorities of Republicans and Democrats, according to
the poll.

Trump is the third president in American history to
face an impeachment trial. Neither Andrew Johnson in 1868 nor Bill
Clinton in 1999 was removed by the Senate. Nixon left office before a
House vote that was likely to impeach him.

The House mounted its
Trump case after a government whistleblower complained about his July
2019 call with Ukraine. The House relied on testimony from current and
former national security officials and diplomats, many who defied White
House instructions not to appear.

Evidence presented in the House
probe has shown that Trump, with Giuliani, pursued investigations of
Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on a Ukrainian gas company’s
board, and sought a probe of a debunked theory that Ukraine interfered
in the 2016 U.S. election.

It’s a story line many in the
president’s camp are still pushing. Giuliani, in an appearance Friday on
“Fox & Friends,” insisted he would present evidence on his new
podcast.

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Laurie Kellman, Matthew Daly and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.