Trump able to survive coup bid by failing establishment

It has been a bad few days for the establishment, really bad.

In a 51-49 vote, the Senate refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and agreed to end the trial Wednesday, acquitting the president of all charges.

Former Secretary of State and Joe Biden surrogate John Kerry was overheard Sunday at a Des Moines hotel talking of the “possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole.”

Tuesday, Trump took his nationally televised victory lap in the U.S. Capitol with his State of the Union address.

Democrats may declare the Trump impeachment a victory for righteousness, but the anger and outrage, the moans and groans now coming off the editorial and op-ed pages and cable TV suggest the media know otherwise.

History, we are told, will vindicate what Pelosi and the Democrats did and stain forever the Republican Party for voting to acquit.

Reality: The impeachment of Trump was an attempted — and failed — coup. The impeachment of Trump was an exercise in pure partisanship and itself an abuse of power.

What was the heart of the Democrats’ case to remove Trump?

Trump failed to invite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House and held up military aid to Kyiv for several months, to get Zelenskiy to hold a news conference to announce Kyiv was looking into how Hunter Biden got on the board of a corrupt energy company at a retainer of $83,000 a month while his father was the chief international monitor of corruption in Ukraine.

And what was the outcome of it all?

Zelenskiy got his meeting with the president. He got the military aid in September. He did not hold the news conference requested. He did not announce an investigation of the Bidens.

No harm, no foul. What punishment did House and Senate Democrats and anti-Trump media demand for the pause in sending weapons for Ukraine?

A political death penalty. Democrats demanded a Republican Senate overturn the election of 2016, make Trump the first president ever impeached and removed, and then ensure people could never vote for him again.

Nancy Pelosi’s House and the Democratic minority in the Senate were demanding a Republican Senate do their dirty work and keep Trump off the ballot in 2020, lest he win a second term.

Elements of the liberal establishment — in the media, “deep state” and major institutions — have sought to destroy Trump. First, they aimed to smear him and prevent his election, and then to overturn it as having been orchestrated by the Kremlin, and then to impeach and remove him, and then to block him from running again.

The damage they have inflicted upon our country’s institutions is serious.

U.S. intelligence agencies are being investigated by U.S. Attorney John Durham for their role in instigating an investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign. The FBI has been discredited by exposure of a conspiracy of top-level agents to spy on Trump’s campaign.

Disloyalty and animosity toward the chief executive appear to permeate the upper echelons of the “deep state.”

Not in our lifetime have the institutions of government and the establishment been held in lower regard.