President Donald Trump has been acquitted by the United States Senate following two votes on his impeachment.
The acquittal brings an end to Trump’s impeachment trial and he will remain in office.
A majority of Senators found Trump not guilty of obstructing Congress as charged and voted 53-47 to acquit him.
Earlier, senators voted 52 to 48 to acquit Trump on an abuse of powers charge, with Republican Mitt Romney breaking rank to vote in favour of conviction.
Romney called Trump’s actions “perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of oath of office that I can imagine”
Democrats will now need to wait until November’s Presidential election to try and end Trump’s presidency.
The outcome capped nearly five months of impeachment proceedings launched in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives, ending in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, and reflective of the nation’s unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.
No president has ever been removed by the Senate, and this was only the third presidential impeachment trial in American History.
With chief justice John Roberts presiding, senators swore to do “impartial justice”, stand at their desk for the roll call and state their votes – “guilty” or “not guilty.”
-With AAP.
Top Comments
The strategy of Trump's camp may be to move on swiftly but being the clinical narcissist that he is, he'll want to linger a while to punish those who dared testify against him.
In true tyrant style, with many history books to attest to how narcissistic leaders work, his predictable playbook will be to hold power at all costs then change the law to ensure he never has to give it up, even if he has to put in a seat-warmer to keep it for him until he's back again after his two terms. See Putin etc.
The stupidity of the human race is that despite knowing this, we're yet to come up with a screening process i.e. psychometric testing for world leaders so that men like this never get a leadership position. Trump will appear to make lots of money for his people initially then will have to work increasingly harder, using more coercive and punitive power and erosion of democracy, to maintain his hold once the illusion starts to dissipate, which it always does, when the losses caused by that prosperity start to emerge. Climate change will likely be Trump's undoing when even the uneducated start to recognise the science, once Trump's neglect of it begins to contribute to real global suffering.
The best chance of getting rid of Trump in 2020 would be for all political lobby groups outside of the Republican party to collaborate and saturate the media space to incentivise women to get rid of him. Women who don't do what their husbands tell them hate Trump and they could make up half the population. Australian women could be just as engaged and empowered at our next election to influence our outcome in the same way. It's time we stopped allowing egotistical, tyrannical, backward, narcissistic male leaders to wreak havoc on our planet. We've tried that and it doesn't work.
Classic Trump Derangement Syndrome. - tyrant who cuts people’s taxes, removes thousands of regulations, protects the nations borders from drugs and criminals, advocates for free speech, protects the right to keep and bare arms, built an economy where the bottom half of earners are improving faster than the top all whilst holding off a soft coup by a bunch of people unhappy that he was duly elected.
Wish we had more tyrants like him, World would be a better place.
The question now is do the Dems double down or change tactics. Like Clinton, Trump has walked away from this with a bounce in the polls.
Trump - winning.
Clinton poll after being impeachment - 73%
Trump poll after being impeachment - 49%
In his defence, this is the highest rating he's achieved in the past 3 years, so it's something.
I reckon the biggest winner in this saga is Sanders. It cause division within Trumps inner circle (those he hasn't fired since he took office), both the Republicans and Democrats took minor collateral damage, and most importantly it tanked Bidens campaign in Iowa.
Actually, it's neither: a quick impeachment and moving on IS their tactic. It's why Pelosi didn't chuck in all of the OTHER things that Trump has done that would be worthy of impeachment. Clear message: Trump sought assistance from a foreign power to smear a domestic political rival, and withheld military aid to do so. Republicans aren't going to hold him to account for that. I'm pretty sure that Democrats will also walk away with a stronger resolution, it's a matter of whether they can translate that into an electroal college victory in November.
Except that aid wasn't withheld, Biden wasn't investigated and he's not even guaranteed to be the Democrats nominee.
The Democrats are 'toast' in the November election. As for the electoral college, Biden supports the electoral college and it is only on the nose with some Democrats, because it didn't go in their favour last election. The purpose of the Electoral College was to ensure that everyone's vote was equal irrespective of the size of the state they live in.