Republican Senators believe Donald Trump is guilty. So what?

His acquittal already is freeing the president up to run the bare-knuckle re-election campaign he wants. But there's a problem

Most Republican Senators now acknowledge Donald Trump used a taxpayer-funded military aid package as leverage in a scheme to compel a foreign government to discredit a top domestic political rival.

So what?

Lamar Alexander, a widely respected veteran Senator and former Education Secretary, echoed many of his GOP colleagues when he said the seven House Democratic impeachment managers made their case that Trump abused the powers of his office and unjustly obstructed a congressional investigation into the Ukraine matter.

So what?

Republican Senators listened for hours and hours over the last two weeks as the President’s made-for-television defense team did next to nothing to convince them that Trump did not try to orchestrate a this-for-that trade with Ukraine’s new and inexperienced president to achieve a personal political advantage over Joe Biden. Remember, the former vice president was at the time the most likely Democratic candidate to capture his party’s nomination and square off with Trump this fall. Biden polls well in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states Trump needs to win again.

So what?

As they snacked on candy and sipped chocolate milk on the Senate floor, Republicans heard a sitting president’s lawyers unapologetically make a Nixonian case that just about anything a commander-in-chief does is — by definitions rejected by most scholars — legal and appropriate. And certainly never impeachable. Not even if a president does something iffy while thinking of his or her re-election campaign.

“If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity Harvard University professor Trump recruited off cable news, told Senators.

A bewildered House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff called many of Dershowitz’s claims “very odd,” and warned Republican Senators he viewed many of the defense team’s arguments as “dangerous.” Based on some questions asked by moderate Republican Senators like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, they also were scratching their heads at the Constitutional theories being thrown against the Senate chamber walls by the president’s lawyers.

So what?

At least, in so many words, that’s what Senate Republicans ultimately concluded. In doing so, they handed Trump perhaps his biggest victory yet — holding the White House after three years of drama and after being just the third sitting chief executive to be impeached is arguably on par with winning it in the first place. Perhaps more to the point: Mr Trump never seems to lose. He embodies the country’s broader political, class and economic divisions — and exploits them like no other.

No one in Washington ever expected House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry would lead to Trump being escorted out of the Oval Office and his No. 2, Vice President Mike Pence, quickly being sworn in as the country’s 46th chief executive. The feeling around the West Wing this week was business as usual. The Capitol was as chaotic as ever. The impeachment trial has played on televisions in Northwest DC restaurants and bars for two weeks. Patrons chatted about Sunday night’s Super Bowl, griped about their coworkers, traded tales of their children, and offered little more than passing glances at the historic goings-on on Capitol Hill.

“Since October 1, the torrent of revelations, arguments, claims and counterclaims has changed very few minds. The country was divided down the middle when this affair began, and it remains so today,” said Bill Galston, a former aide in Bill Clinton’s White House.

What’s clear is all the Trump naysayers who dismissed his social media posts as “just tweets” were wrong.

Republican lawmakers, even veteran Senators, fear them. Being on the receiving end of a Trump Twitter barrage the likes of which he unleashed earlier this week on Bolton, from whom they opted against hearing, is simply a political death sentence. Trump is simply too popular with most Republicans.

Sure, a majority of Americans said they supported his impeachment and thought he should be removed for conducting what Schiff and other Democrats dubbed a “shakedown” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

So what?

“Acquittal will embolden the president further, and allow him to advance policy recommendations that will be even more polarizing,” said G William Hoagland, a former aide to GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill First. “The President will have almost totally solidified his control over the Republican Party, and that will change the path forward for Republicans after the 2020 elections.”

Trump’s approval rating among Republicans remains impressively high — or, as GOP lawmakers view it, intimidatingly so. A recent Economist/YouGov survey found 88 per cent of Republican voters approve of the job he’s doing. And remember that Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who has criticized Trump during the impeachment affair, has seen his own approval rating among GOP voters tumble by nearly 20 points.

The president wields his power like no chief executive before him. He’s brash. He’s overt. He’s ruthless. He’s as adept at getting out of trouble he created for himself — even benefiting from it among his base — than perhaps any modern US politician.

In short, he’s everything most US politicians aren’t.

But he’s exactly what enough of an increasingly frustrated and cynical electorate craved two years ago — and they continue to cheer him on, as a raucous rally audience did in Iowa on Thursday night when he tongue-lashed Democrats over impeachment and their “radical socialist” policies.

Polls conducted since House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry last October suggest Trump will be a tough out come Election Day — in fact, they increasingly suggest he has a real chance of again stitching together enough Electoral College votes to secure a second term.

All the Trump critics who said he lacked the political experience and skills to be the boss of a political party that featured a number of heavyweights were wrong.

He was and is simply willing to do what others aren’t. He was and is willing to bend and fracture — perhaps even break, depending on who’s standing behind that now-famous lectern on the Senate chamber — the country’s most sacrosanct traditions and laws.

Many polls of hypothetical general election races show Trump trailing all of the top Democratic candidates. Political analysts and pollsters are again counting out the man who continues to defy his detractors, outrun political and legal trouble, beat the odds.

So what?

Trump appears the only American politician with an answer to that simple-yet-complex question. And, in typical Trump fashion, that answer is shrouded in the vague, fear-inducing language of a conservative populist who just might be, as Vice President Mike Pence recently put it in a candid moment captured by a hot microphone, “unstoppable.”

“We will never let socialism destroy American healthcare,” Trump said during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. “Socialism destroys nations, and always remember, freedom safeguards the soul." The comment is a sign his acquittal is freeing him up to run the bare-knuckle re-election campaign he wants. But Senate Republicans’ collective decision, as summarized by Alexander, that “the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision” on Trump’s actions could have consequences beyond November.

“It will be more difficult to keep the Senate in Republicans’ control after the 2022 mid-term elections,” Hoagland said, “making the last two years of a second term of the Trump presidency a complete nightmare.”

That’s what.