The impeachment of President Trump heads to a Senate trial

Hunter is the younger of Joe Biden’s two sons. He never showed as much promise as his brother Beau, stumbling through life and often trading on his dad’s name and position for financial gain. He’s more or less operated in the background as something of a black sheep in the family, but he emerged at the forefront of American politics in 2019 over work he did in Ukraine that fueled a bogus conspiracy theory at the heart of Trump’s decision to strong-arm the country’s president.

It’s not unusual for the children of successful politicians to trade on their family’s famous name and connections to get ahead in life. And when that happens, most political parents hope for a trajectory like the one enjoyed by Beau Biden until his life was cut short by cancer in 2015.

President Donald Trump is continuing his retribution campaign against administration officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry, this time firing his handpicked ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland.

The dismissal, which came just hours after he pushed out Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother from the National Security Council, makes it clear that the president feels few restraints after the Senate acquitted him earlier this week.

“Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth,” Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified in November, during the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Ukraine.

But now that the Senate has delivered the president “total acquittal” on two articles of impeachment, a triumphant Trump is apparently seeking vengeance. And Vindman appears to be his first target.

The post-impeachment victory lap speech President Donald Trump delivered on Thursday from the White House has to be one of the most bonkers official events in presidential history.

Speaking off the cuff, Trump began remarks by falsely claiming that the investigations into him predated his presidency, called the Russia investigation “bullshit,” and mocked a Purple Heart recipient who testified during the impeachment trial. He also complained Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted and referred to former leaders of the FBI as “scum.”

This piece was originally published in November 2019. Since then, the Democratic House impeached the president and the Republican Senate voted to acquit him, in a “trial” with no witnesses or new evidence. Public opinion remains divided along the exact same lines it was divided before the whole thing started.

Back in 2017, I wrote a piece speculating that the Mueller hearings might bring America’s epistemic crisis to a head. That crisis involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality. We have sorted ourselves into polarized factions living in different worlds, not just of values, but of facts. Communication between them is increasingly difficult.

President Donald Trump was always going to take a victory lap following his triumphant State of the Union and his acquittal in the Senate.

But his White House speech on Thursday — billed as a public statement to “discuss our Country’s VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!” — was, well, who even knows.

President Donald Trump’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday in Washington, DC — an annual tradition for presidents — made clear he blames Democrats and even Republican Mitt Romney for the impeachment process that ended with him being acquitted by Republican senators the day before.

Trump, who waved around a newspaper with the headline “ACQUITTED” when he arrived at the event, spoke immediately after Washington Post columnist Arthur Brooks. The contrast between Trump and Brooks was stark: Brooks addressed traditional Christian themes during his remarks, urging attendees to “love your enemies” and transcend “contempt.” Trump, however, began his speech by saying, “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you.”

On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted.

On the surface, President Donald Trump can claim popular vindication after Wednesday’s impeachment vote. Senators voted 52-48 to acquit him on charges that he abused power, and 53-47 to acquit him on obstruction of Congress charges.

The reality, though, is that the only reason a majority of the Senate voted to keep Trump in office is that the body is configured in a way that systemically advantages Republicans. The blue state of California has 68 times as many people as the red state of Wyoming, for example, but both states still receive two senators.

Minutes after the Senate vote to acquit him on Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump posted a tweet undercutting the belief a number of Republican senators expressed in recent days that getting impeached might prompt him to tone it down a little.

Trump posted a video with an edited animation of a Time magazine cover teasing that he, or at the very least someone with the same last name, will be running for president in 2020, 2024, 2028, and beyond. It ends with Trump standing being an election placard reading, “TRUMP 4EVA.”

July 2017 seems like a million years ago now, but in some ways it feels like little has changed. Take this article I wrote that month. The headline is “The latest revelation won’t end Trump’s presidency. Only Paul Ryan can.” The first section is subtitled “Robert Mueller can’t fell Donald Trump.”

The only part of that which feels dated — and the main mistake I see in my analysis, in retrospect — is the name “Paul Ryan.” It was never up to Paul Ryan, after all. His successor, Nancy Pelosi, did impeach Trump for holding aid to Ukraine hostage in hopes of damaging a political rival.

Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal is a warning sign that something has gone deeply wrong in our political system. It shows a kind of subtle corruption of the law that has, in other countries, led to the decline and fall of their democratic systems in their entirety.

Senate Republicans didn’t violate the Constitution’s rules for holding an impeachment trial. They adhered fairly reasonably to the letter of the law and can credibly claim they did all that was legally required of them. But this was a sham trial, one whose outcome was never seriously in doubt. By following the formal rules, Senate Republicans gave this fiction a veneer of formal legitimacy. All of them, with the brave exception of Mitt Romney, weaponized the letter of the law against its spirit.

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney just voted to convict the president on one article of impeachment: abuse of power.

The Utah senator stands in stark contrast to every other person in the 53-member Republican conference, who all voted to acquit President Trump on both articles. Romney was also one of just two Republicans to vote in favor of considering more witnesses for the trial last week, alongside Sen. Susan Collins. He voted in line with his party on the second article, obstruction of Congress.

President Donald Trump is the clear winner of the now-resolved Senate impeachment battle — the question is at what cost.

He was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, and he even got his way on persuading the Senate to eschew any witnesses, defying Democratic requests and the overwhelming preference of public opinion.

The Senate just voted to acquit President Donald Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — ending a more than four-month impeachment process that began after revelations that Trump had withheld aid from Ukraine and pressured its leader to investigate Hunter Biden.

The acquittal is the third time in US history the Senate has acquitted a president who has previously been impeached, after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Clinton in 1999.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, just became the sole exception to the Senate’s party-line vote to acquit President Trump — and the first senator who has ever voted to remove a president of his own party.

Romney says he broke party lines to vote to convict on one of two charges, abuse of power, because he believes Trump’s conduct shows that the president is unfit and that he “should be removed from office.”

President Donald Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial won’t just serve as an indictment of the American political system, it will also deal a body blow to US foreign policy efforts to curb global corruption and promote the rule of the law.

For decades, a fixture of American diplomacy has been to get other nations to follow America’s example. There’s a top-level official at the State Department and multiple bureaus there that work on these very issues.

This afternoon — and for the third time in history — the US Senate will vote on acquitting or convicting a president of multiple articles of impeachment. The outcome is one that’s essentially been expected since the trial started just over two weeks ago: President Donald Trump will be acquitted.

Given Republicans’ 53-person majority in the Senate, the votes are going to fall far short of the 67 needed to convict and remove the president from office.

The rationale Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) gave for voting for acquit President Donald Trump aged poorly before she even had a chance to officially cast it.

Following a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday in which she announced she’ll vote to acquit, Collins told Norah O’Donnell of CBS that she believes Trump “has learned from this case” and “will be much more cautious in the future.”

Less that one day out from the final vote in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, we now know that almost every Republican is expected to acquit him.

It’s an outcome that’s long been a foregone conclusion, though House Democrats had hoped to sway at least one Republican to vote in favor of conviction on the two articles. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced this week that they would both be voting for acquittal, leaving Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) as the lone swing Republican who hasn’t announced which way he’ll go. Romney and Collins, previously, were the only two Republicans who voted to call more witnesses for the impeachment trial.

House impeachment manager Adam Schiff is looking for just one Republican.

Schiff on Monday made an emotional plea to Republican senators during the closing arguments of the impeachment trial, calling on them to defy their party and vote to convict President Donald Trump.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who once called for impeaching former President Barack Obama over his decision to make recess appointments, is now claiming that it’s Democrats who’ve actually “lowered the bar” for impeachment.

On Saturday, Ernst said that former Vice President and 2020 contender Joe Biden “should be very careful” with his words around President Donald Trump’s impeachment. “We can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him,’” she said.

Jay Sekulow’s closing argument against convicting President Donald Trump on Monday centered on how Democrats purportedly had it out for Trump since the beginning. But as has been the case with much of Trump’s impeachment trial defense, a key part of Sekulow’s argument involved misleading people.

Sekulow tried to make a big deal out of a January 30, 2017 tweet posted by Mark Zaid, an attorney representing the whistleblower who first sounded the alarm about Trump’s Ukraine dealings, in which he wrote that a “#coup has started” and added, “#impeachment will follow ultimately.” The point Sekulow was trying to make is that Trump’s opponents were planning to topple him ever since he took office, and that the Ukraine scandal was just a pretext for trying to make it happen.

Now that the Senate has blocked the consideration of witnesses, President Donald Trump’s acquittal is all but guaranteed. He’ll still need to wait a few days, though.

A Senate vote on the two articles of impeachment won’t take place until 4 pm Wednesday afternoon, after Trump has already given the State of the Union address on Tuesday. That’s according to a resolution the Senate passed Friday night, which lays out the schedule for the next few days:

Vox’s Ezra Klein also discusses the implications of President Donald Trump’s likely acquittal on the most-recent episode of the podcast Impeachment, Explained. You can listen to it here.

Senate Republicans are preparing to acquit President Donald Trump — and convict the American political system.