As part of his closing remarks Tuesday, Jay Sekulow, a defense attorney for President Trump, urged senators to put themselves in Trump’s shoes. It was an odd but interesting challenge.

When you accept it, the view from there is a series of unhappy flashbacks. It starts with Trump’s 2016 campaign being investigated by the FBI. Before he took office, then bureau Director James Comey showed Trump parts of the Steele dossier, calling it “salacious and unverified.”

Said Sekulow, “It was so salacious and unverified, the FBI had used it to get FISA warrants” to spy on the campaign.

Within weeks of taking office, Trump fired Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, starting a two-year probe that hung over the Trump White House like a giant cloud before coming up empty. Along the way, FBI agent Peter Strzok and his office paramour, lawyer Lisa Page, became household names for their texts about an “insurance policy” in case Trump won and the “smell” of his voters.

Sekulow didn’t mention many details as he hurried down memory lane, aiming to get to the point that the impeachment case “didn’t occur in a vacuum.” Seizing on the Ukraine issue, he suggested, was just the latest stage of the relentless effort by Democrats to block Trump from getting to the White House, and then knock him out after he got there.

It was an effective approach that built on the defense team’s two days of skillful and strategic answers to the House Democrats’ case. But Sekulow was also making a larger point, namely about the disastrous impact the anti-Trump agenda is having on our nation, and will have, perhaps, for generations.

Never in modern times has there been such a nasty, permanent campaign to thwart and take out a president. The effort has taught a new generation of Americans that Dems are ruthless and have two enormous advantages, and both have played major roles in the anti-Trump campaign.

That the permanent bureaucracy leans left has never been a secret. But the shockingly brazen role of the FBI, the CIA and others in the law enforcement and intelligence agencies convinced me that the term “deep state” is indeed appropriate.

Some, including Comey and former CIA leader John Brennan, were so clearly abusing their offices and, later, their knowledge and contacts to destabilize the administration that it is hard to look at those agencies without wondering if other snakes are still at work. The continuing leaks suggest they are, with the reports about John Bolton’s manuscript the latest example.

The other Dem advantage is the media. It, too, has always leaned left, but the bias involved in demonizing Trump and his supporters is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Right out of the gate, it was obvious that the same media that had served as cheerleaders for the Obama administration were committed to stopping Trump. Even now, studies show more than 90% of broadcast news coverage is negative toward the president.

That these two forces, the deep state and the left-wing media, would unite as they have is also unprecedented. The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN have become errand boys for Comey, Brennan and others. Andrew McCabe, a dirty cop fired by the FBI for lying, is a paid contributor on CNN, criticizing Trump!

Sometimes, only in America is not a good thing.

In his closing, White House counsel Pat Cipollone cleverly played old tapes of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jerry Nadler blasting the impeachment of Bill Clinton 21 years ago as unfair and bad for the country. Now they are guilty, he was saying, of the same thing.

Cipollone might also have recalled a more recent example, the one from just last March when Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she opposed the effort by some in her party to impeach Trump. She told The Washington Post, “It is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

The last dismissive line notwithstanding, the comment shows Pelosi was for traditional norms before she was against them. Only six months later, she greenlighted a purely partisan impeachment case that is neither compelling nor overwhelming.

The only thing she was right about was that it would further divide the country. In that regard, Pelosi’s celebratory distributing of pens she used to sign the impeachment papers will be a permanent reminder that Democrats, despite their denial, are enjoying impeachment. Only the high-fives were kept secret.

Now that both sides have made their cases, the trial is either winding down toward expected acquittal, or taking a breather before a potentially explosive fight over witnesses.

Meanwhile, if the Bolton leak doesn’t drive enough GOP senators into the Dem camp for witnesses, expect another leak or line of attack to emerge. That’s the left’s playbook, and as the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh demonstrated, the deep state and the media will do anything they can to sink Trump.

But that alliance is up against a president who is willing — and eager — to fight back. Those who doubt should remember that Kavanaugh was confirmed because Trump didn’t buckle.

Doubters can also check out the presentation of two Trump lawyers Monday afternoon, Pam Bondi and Eric Herschmann, who previewed the brutal treatment Joe and Hunter Biden could expect as witnesses.

The former vice president, still leading his party’s presidential candidates in most national polls, would be shredded by the overwhelming evidence that he looked the other way while his son profited from his official position in Ukraine, China and perhaps elsewhere. For all the talk of fighting corruption, the Biden family was getting rich from it.

Do Schumer and Pelosi want to sacrifice Biden in a bid to damage Trump?

That’s the choice they face. Either the nation moves on to other business and the election, or the parties engage in mutual destruction over Bolton and the Bidens.

Acquittal and moving on is my hope. Mutual destruction is my fear.

New take on Liz-Bern

Reader Tom Cunningham wants to correct Elizabeth Warren in her dispute with Bernie Sanders. He writes: “She didn’t hear Bernie correctly. What he said was, ‘An Indian woman could never be elected President.’ ”

Foolish Arab ‘nay’bors

From Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) — “Palestinians staged protests Tuesday against US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, hours before it was to be unveiled in Washington. Thousands demonstrated in Gaza, burning pictures of Trump and the American flag.”

The foolish rejectionism again proves the wisdom of the late Abba Eban: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

De B’s fuzzy myth

Mayor Bill de Blasio, trying to defend his race-baiting, tone-deaf chancellor, said Tuesday:

“I don’t know anybody who cares more about kids and families than Richard Carranza.”

Can we have a vote on that?