Of course president Trump was acquitted

The impeachment of President Trump was unfounded in law and in fact and was never anything but a smear-job organised by the Democratic House intelligence chairman (Adam Schiff) with a pretend whistleblower. Trump asked the president of Ukraine for the facts about the association of former vice president Biden and his son’s activities in Ukraine, not a condemnation; that was not inappropriate. president Zelensky has said there was no pressure, the investigation seems not to have occurred, and the assistance to Ukraine was sent within legislated deadlines.

The House of Representatives procedure was spurious; the president received none of the rights accorded to defendants in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and which had been granted to the three previous presidents in the same process, (Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton). The charges were not crimes, and no evidence of Trump committing what was charged (abuse of power and contempt of Congress), was adduced anyway.

The impeachment and removal of a president was foreseen by the authors of the Constitution as a remedy to criminally egregious conduct or an assault on the Constitution itself. It is a step equivalent to the removal of a British monarch while revoking the results of a general election. No American president has ever been guilty of impeachable offences. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean moderate elevated by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was attacked because of his moderate attitude to the South. Richard Nixon was an outstanding president and there is still no evidence that he committed any crimes, but some members of his entourage did and his political capital evaporated; he spared the country the embarrassment of an impeachment trial and resigned, protesting his innocence. Bill Clinton probably lied to a grand jury about his extramarital sex life, but this was not what the authors of the Constitution or 210 years of national experience required to remove a president. There has been no evidence that Donald Trump did anything seriously exceptionable.

Because Trump ran against the entire political class including the national political media, and was as critical of the Bushes as of the Clintons and Obama, the Washington establishment had trouble believing that he had been elected fairly. First they devised the monstrous fraud that Trump had colluded with Russia. Hillary Clinton attributed her defeat to the animosity of FBI director James Comey (who whitewashed her), and to Trump’s 'treason' with Russia. It is now clear that the Justice Department and the intelligence services corruptly assisted the Democrats against Trump; it was the closest the United States has ever come to tanks on the White House lawn, and a swath of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign will almost certainly be indicted by the special counsel, (John Durham). This frivolous, failed recourse to impeachment should deter for a long time the temptation of another abuse of this remedy by a hostile House of Representatives majority.

The Democrats have become addicted to lumbering Trump with legal harassment and, with the Trump-hating national media, have struggled to maintain a cloud of suspicion over him, just as they claimed he was a racist, misogynist, and warmonger.

Now they will have to get on without the pretence that Trump is about to be led out of the Oval Office in handcuffs, and are forced to run against his record: the elimination of unemployment, of oil imports, and of Chinese theft of American technology; illegal immigration reduced by 80 per cent, deregulation of the economy, taxes cut for 87 per cent of taxpayers, renegotiated trade agreements, avoidance of the Green Terror, Isis smashed, and Nato back to a semblance of an alliance, not just a gang of slackers enjoying the US security guarantee. He has revived the concept of nuclear non-proliferation with Iran and North Korea, countries which swindled his predecessors.

Most dangerous to the Democrats, Trump’s sharp reduction of poverty and of the crime rate, and the creation of millions of new jobs, have him rising steadily in the polls, including among usually Democratic minorities. The stock exchanges, in which most Americans are directly or indirectly invested, have added £9 trillion in equity values ($3,000 per capita). The lowest 20 per cent of income-earners have moved up more quickly than the wealthiest and the United States is now the only important country that is reversing the income disparity gap. Trump has used social media, whose principal corporate leaders are among his militant opponents, to counter the 'fake news' media. He is having the most successful first term of any US president except Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Nixon. The Democratic presidential candidates are astoundingly unfeasible and that party is too tainted with socialist nostrums to be acceptable to most American voters. Supposedly impartial media, like CNN, the BBC and the once-serious Economist, (which enthusiastically embraced an impeachment conviction), should reflect upon their biases. (The Guardian is beyond hope.)