Donald Trump is the president of the United States, and the Democrats appear bound and determined to ensure that he remains in that position for another four years.

That’s the bottom-line takeaway from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to open a formal “impeachment inquiry.” Donald Trump is not going to be removed from office. There is no shortcut to overturning the 2016 election. This is just the latest in a long line of increasingly weak attempts by House Democrats to discredit the president, and the inevitable futility of this effort is crucial to understanding the Democrats’ true motivations.

There’s practically zero chance that they are actually going to impeach the president over this Ukraine nonsense. It’s just too silly, especially considering that we already had to go through 2 ½ years of Russiagate, only to find out that there was never any “there” there.

Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership are huffing and puffing, but this house is even sturdier than the others that they likewise failed to blow down. They choke back crocodile tears while accusing Trump of violating the law, betraying the Constitution, and undermining national security, yet they can’t explain how his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky does any of those things.

They can’t name the law that President Trump supposedly violated. They can’t point to the part of the Constitution they think is injured. They can’t explain how American national security was threatened. They just keep repeating the same carefully rehearsed talking points over and over again. It would sound like a broken record even if the same Democrats hadn’t said the exact same things about non-existent “collusion” throughout the Russiagate hoax.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is the only Democrat on Capitol Hill who’s even trying to give some shape to the flailing accusations that his colleagues trotted out before they even saw the transcript that supposedly supported them. Schiff’s solution is to behave like a downright lunatic, crafting a bizarre mobster movie fantasy with President Trump playing the role of an international Don Corleone shaking down helpless foreign leaders. Seriously. Look at his tweets.

What’s the “offer Zelensky can’t refuse”? That he should work with Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate hacking in the 2016 American election, which may have taken place in Ukraine — which is exactly what Senate Democrats asked Zelensky’s predecessor to do just last year?

The left is staking a good part of its argument on the fact that President Trump also mentioned the undisputed fact that Joe Biden bragged about explicitly threatening to cut off $1 billion in aid to Ukraine if former President Petro Poroshenko didn’t fire the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s energy firm, but that perfectly reasonable request doesn’t change a thing.

You see, when Democrats ask Ukrainians to do something they think will hurt President Trump, they consider it a fulfillment of their patriotic duty. When President Trump asks Ukrainians to do the exact same thing, the Democrats call it unconstitutional, illegal, impeachable, and even compare it to Mafia tactics.

Democrats can’t possibly believe this is a legitimate scandal, especially now that the president has voluntarily released the full, unredacted transcript of the call, allowing the American people to judge for themselves. Impeachment is deeply unpopular with the electorate, and it’s difficult to imagine that Nancy Pelosi would be so foolish as to hold an actual impeachment vote by the full House on such a ridiculous pretext.

Even if she manages to walk the tightrope of holding an “impeachment inquiry” without launching actual impeachment proceedings, Pelosi is going to seriously damage her party’s presidential nominee next year. It’s almost as though she wants President Trump to remain in the White House through 2024.