Republicans had chased phantoms, political ephemera. Like Trump, they listened to propagandists in the right-wing press and fell into a hole of irrelevance. What about the whistle-blower? Unmask him! He’s a deep-stater, a never-Trumper!

But the whistle-blower was only a bit player, another in a long line of public servants whose vaccine of duty was strong enough to resist the contagion of Trump. The whistle-blower’s motive was, perhaps, stated best by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Purple Heart on his dress uniform speaking loudly, who said simply, “Here, right matters.”

A month or so into 2020, Trump would be impeached. Sondland’s testimony could not get the Cult of Trump, and those cowards in office who fear that mob, to budge. But those who voted for removal put a tattoo on the 45th president that can never be erased: He violated the sacred oath. The record was there for all time.

It remained for the Democrats to do their part. At a crucial debate on the evening of the most consequential day of the Trump presidency, the opposition party needed to show that they were not the crazy Marxists of an election some had framed as socialists vs. the sociopath.

They had no clear front-runner. But they had an elder statesman, revered the world over, the two-term former president. When Barack Obama urged moderation, saying, “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” the Democrat who will win on this election night of 2020 heeded his advice.

That crucial debate came while the race was still in flux. But a trio of elections the same month had given Democrats a road map. They could win in deeply red Kentucky and Louisiana, and complete the political transition in Virginia, if they backed popular plans to elevate average Americans. That, and Trump’s policies of trying to deny health care to the poor, of running up a trillion-dollar deficit to enrich a handful at the very top, of turning a blind eye to mass shootings of schoolchildren, would take down Republicans.

Sanity prevailed. Most Democrats came to see that it would do nothing for their cause to gain another million progressives on the coasts if they still lost 80,000 people in the old industrial heartland. The key, as extolled by the eventual winner, was to rebuild the Obama coalition.