Ever since Donald J. Trump began his run for president, he has been surrounded by an ever-shifting cast of lawyers with varying abilities to control, channel and satisfy their mercurial and headstrong client.

During the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Michael D. Cohen arranged for hush money payments to be made to a former pornographic film actress. In the second year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, John M. Dowd, the head of the team defending the president in the Russia investigation, quit after he concluded that Mr. Trump was refusing to listen to his counsel.

By Mr. Trump’s third year in office, he had found a new lawyer to do his bidding as Rudolph W. Giuliani first undertook a campaign to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr. and then helped lead the fruitless effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, with stops in Ukraine and at Four Seasons Total Landscaping along the way.

On Friday, the latest members of Mr. Trump’s legal cast took center stage in his impeachment trial and for the most part delivered exactly what he always seems to want from his lawyers: not precise, learned legal arguments but public combat, in this case including twisted facts, rewritten history and attacks on opponents.

Despite an often unorthodox and undisciplined approach from his legal teams, Mr. Trump has survived more legal challenges as president than any of his recent predecessors. Although federal investigators uncovered the hush money payments and significant evidence he may have obstructed the Russia investigation, he was never charged. He was acquitted by the Senate in his first impeachment trial related to the Ukraine pressure campaign, and he appeared poised on Friday to see a similar outcome in this impeachment.

Legal experts, white-collar defense lawyers and even some of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers acknowledge that his survival has largely been a function of the fact that he was the president of the United States, a position that gave him great powers to evade legal consequence.

“At the outset of the administration I would have said it would be remarkable for someone to run this gauntlet and survive,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former longtime senior Justice Department official.

After initially stumbling in its first round of arguments on Tuesday, the latest team — either the seventh or eighth to defend Mr. Trump since he became president, depending on your math — followed the playbook Mr. Trump has long wanted his lawyers to adhere to.

They channeled his grievances and aggressively spun, making what-about arguments that tried to cast his own behavior as not so bad when compared with the other side. Democrats found their performance infuriatingly misleading, but it potentially provided the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate opposed to convicting Mr. Trump with talking points they can use to justify their votes.

“Hypocrisy,” one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Michael T. van der Veen, said after they played a several-minutes-long clip of prominent Democrats and media commentators using language like “fight” in an effort to show that Mr. Trump’s own words before the riot could have had no role in inciting the violence.

“The reality is, Mr. Trump was not in any way, shape or form instructing these people to fight or to use physical violence,” Mr. van der Veen said. “What he was instructing them to do was to challenge their opponents in primary elections to push for sweeping election reforms, to hold big tech responsible.”

Serving as one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers is a true high-wire act for a range of reasons, from his indifference to the law and norms to his long-held belief that he is his own best defender and spokesman. In the 1970s, under the tutelage of the lawyer Roy M. Cohn — whose aggressiveness was matched by his lack of adherence to ethical standards — Mr. Trump began conflating legal and public relations problems.

These factors have often led Mr. Trump to ignore legal advice and dictate to the lawyers what he wants them to do. Some lawyers have survived for years with Mr. Trump through various investigations, such as Jay Sekulow and the Florida-based couple Marty and Jane Raskin. They were involved in defending Mr. Trump in his first impeachment battle. And they had successes defending Mr. Trump in the highest-profile investigation he faced as president, the special counsel inquiry into possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russian officials.

But those lawyers are not part of his current team.

Neither is Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel who spent weeks at the end of the Trump term batting away various efforts to overturn the election results. As he did with a previous White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump repeatedly wanted the White House counsels to act as his personal lawyers.

And Mr. Trump’s willingness to listen to lawyers who tell him what he does not want to hear dwindled significantly after the Nov. 3 election. Instead, he relied on Mr. Giuliani, whom other Trump aides blame for ensnaring Mr. Trump in his two impeachment battles, to guide him in his effort to overturn the results of the election.

Mr. Giuliani repeatedly told associates that he would be involved in the impeachment defense, despite his status as a potential witness, since he addressed the Trump rally crowd on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump ultimately told Mr. Giuliani that he would not be involved.

But Mr. Trump’s advisers struggled to find a legal team that would defend him.

Finally, with help from an ally, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mr. Trump’s advisers announced that he had hired Butch Bowers, a well-known lawyer with experience representing South Carolina politicians facing crises.

But just over a week before the trial was to begin, Mr. Bowers and the four lawyers connected to him abruptly left, though another lawyer, David I. Schoen, who was expected from the beginning to be part of the team, remained on board.

In another reminder of his ad hoc approach, Mr. Trump asked associates on Thursday night whether it was too late to add or remove lawyers from the team, as Mr. Schoen briefly told the team he was quitting over a debate about how to use the video clips the defense showed on Friday. Mr. Trump called Mr. Schoen and he agreed to rejoin the team, two people briefed on the events said.

Just a few hours before Mr. Trump’s team was to appear in the well of the Senate, the group was still hashing out the order of appearance of his two chief lawyers, Mr. Schoen and Bruce L. Castor Jr. In the end, they decided that a third lawyer, Mr. van der Veen, would deliver the opening act.

The uncertainty apparently stemmed from Mr. Castor’s widely panned appearance on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, unfocused opening statement that enraged his client. Mr. Trump has told advisers and friends he did not want to hear from Mr. Castor anymore, people familiar with the Trump team’s discussions said.

People familiar with the makeup of the legal team said that Eric Herschmann, a lawyer and ally of the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who worked in the West Wing in the final year of the administration, was a key figure in putting it together.

When Mr. Trump asked Mr. Herschmann who had hired Mr. Castor after his disastrous outing on Tuesday, Mr. Herschmann, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange, sought to lay the blame on Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Mr. Herschmann did not respond to an email seeking comment.

By the end of the day Friday, Mr. van der Veen, a personal injury lawyer from Philadelphia, had emerged as Mr. Trump’s primary defender, handling questions from senators, making a series of false and outlandish claims, calling the impeachment a version of “constitutional cancel culture” and declaring that Friday’s proceedings had been his “most miserable” experience in Washington.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead House impeachment manager, responded, “I guess we’re sorry, but man, you should have been here on Jan. 6.”

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.