“Alarming as it is, the corrosive conclusion to 2020 in America was plainly visible in advance. A year ago, the impeachment of President Donald Trump foreshadowed the damage he has wreaked in the six weeks since Joe Biden beat him in the election. It demonstrated Trump’s elevation of self over country, his willingness to subvert democracy, and the Republican Party’s refusal to constrain his behavior. It was hardly clear then that Biden would end up as Trump’s general election opponent, much less that he would win. Biden was struggling through early Democratic primary debates on the way to embarrassing early losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

“But impeachment proceedings showed how much Trump feared Barack Obama’s vice-president. A pile of evidence – from a presidential phone call transcript to the sworn testimony of credible witnesses, including his own appointees – showed Trump sought to extort the government of Ukraine by making US aid contingent on the announcement of an investigation he could use to smear Biden. When the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, every Republican in the chamber voted to exonerate him. Then the impeachment articles moved to trial in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the lead House prosecutor, appealed to the jury’s sense of values, morality and national security. ‘You know you can’t trust this President to do what’s right for this country,’ Schiff told senators. ‘You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now, he’s done it before, he’ll do it for the next several months.’ ‘He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to,’ Schiff concluded. ‘This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed…Because right matters, and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost'” – CNN.