Impeachment trial to end but its aftershocks will rock America

America’s latest “national nightmare” will not end when Republicans vote to acquit President Donald Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, possibly as early as Friday.

A mere four months after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered an impeachment inquiry and six after Trump’s now notorious “do us a favor” call with Ukraine’s President, Trump will get on with his term as the third US President to be impeached by the House of Representatives and not removed by the Senate.
Given Trump’s political temperament, and the impending battle between the parties for control of the White House, it seems unlikely there will be a healing voice to help reconcile a divided country — such as President Gerald Ford’s, when he declared that “our long national nightmare is over” in the wake of Watergate.
The President will skip free despite strong evidence to suggest that he abused a public trust by trying to coerce a foreign power — with millions of dollars in taxpayer cash — to play a role in a US presidential election. The many unresolved storylines and loose ends of this divisive episode will ensure that the political significance of his off-the-books diplomatic scheme in Kiev may only become more corrosive with time.
Thanks to the estranged political realities of the age, Trump is likely to interpret his latest escape, in a business and political career that has often flirted with disaster, as an inducement to broaden his crusade to expand his personal power and shake off remaining constitutional guard rails.Still, the side effects of the showdown will reverberate for years and subsequent political eras. It will claim short-term victims — maybe even including the President or those who pursued him with elections only nine months away. But the dramatic events at the turn of 2019 and 2020 could also change how future generations understand presidential power and the process of purging its abuse by the use of impeachment itself.
Unknown consequences for November
Most immediately, the unsuccessful effort to oust Trump will help shape November’s election that may partially be framed around whether Republicans pay a price for saving him or Democrats get a backlash for impeaching him.
Democrats hope that months focusing on apparent abuses of power by Trump will have soured crucial swing-state suburban voters irrevocably against him. But they’ll worry they electrified Trump’s base.

Republican theory for Trump acquittal could unleash unrestrained presidential power
Republicans may prevent further damage to the President by preventing the calling of witnesses with potentially incriminating evidence such as former national security adviser John Bolton in a closely watched vote Friday. Some GOP members have told their leaders that they just want to get the trial over with — since even its two weeks on the Senate floor have damaged their reelection prospects, CNN reported.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a retiring Tennessee Republican, all but assured no witnesses would be called during the trial when he announced late Thursday night that he would vote against a motion to call them. Alexander was seen as the most likely potential fourth Republican to vote in favor of hearing witnesses. His decision appears to end Democratic hopes of hearing from Bolton under oath.
With this in mind, it’s possible Democrats benefit politically from the chance to lambast what happened in the Senate over the last two weeks as a mockery of a fair trial. Still, they would have loved to have had Bolton on the record to further color a dark picture of Trump’s behavior.
Republicans will take a risk by blocking witnesses. They elected to perpetrate what Democrats will find easy to portray as a cover up by suppressing a chance to hear Bolton — a witness with information about the core accusation in the impeachment case — from telling his story.
“You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial, and you don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation,” Pelosi said on Thursday, already excavating a seam of post-impeachment politics.
When the former national security adviser’s information — contained in the manuscript of a book first reported by the New York Times — eventually comes out, GOP lawmakers must hope that it does not leave them badly exposed. As it is, history may remember the 2020 GOP as making a choice between power and political short-termism and shielding the Constitution and accepted codes of presidential behavior.