WASHINGTON—Have you ever heard of a trial without witnesses? You have now.

What had become the key drama of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, whether to hear new testimony and evidence, was resolved Friday evening by a 51-49 vote against.

It’s all over now but the shouting — although there will be lots of shouting. Senators were still working into the evening to wrangle the plans to close the trial, but the final vote to acquit the president and allow him to remain in office appeared likely to be put off, possibly until as late as Wednesday.

But the final result is not in doubt.

So what have Americans, and those watching from Canada and around the world, learned through this whole ordeal?

Let’s go to the definitive interpretive text, the statement of Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander. In explaining his vote, he said new testimony was not required because the proof was already conclusive: “There is no need for more evidence to conclude that the president withheld United States aid, at least in part, to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; the House managers have proved this with what they call a ‘mountain of overwhelming evidence.’”

He went on to say Trump’s “inappropriate” action “undermines the principle of equal protection under the law.”

Lesson one, according to the Republican senator who was widely seen as casting the vote that saved the day for Trump: the president leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of government money to serve his own political campaign interests, and then — the obvious but unstated inference — emphatically lied about it for months.

How is this seen as helping Trump? On to the next lesson from his conclusions: “The Constitution does not give the Senate the power to remove the president from office and ban him from this year’s ballot simply for actions that are inappropriate.”

This was a foreseeable conclusion — early in the week, it was clear that the most feasible defence ammunition would likely come from Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s arguments that this abuse of power, even if proven, didn’t rise to an impeachable standard.

It wasn’t just Alexander. Throughout Friday, as lawyers made arguments and the Senate’s leaders chaotically negotiated how to draw the curtain on this production, other Republican senators echoed his logic.

Sen. Rob Portman issued a statement saying the president’s actions were “wrong and inappropriate” but did not “rise to the level of removal from office.”

Sen. Marco Rubio avoided directly accusing the president, but argued that “just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office.”

Sen. Ben Sasse told reporters in the Capitol hallway, “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us.”

But not everyone agreed. “It’s a coverup — that’s what the Senate has done now,” Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, said on CNN. Hundreds of historians had earlier signed a letter saying that Trump’s “numerous and flagrant abuses of power are precisely what the Framers (of the Constitution) had in mind as grounds for impeaching and removing a president.”

But Republican senators concluded they could not — or should not — do it.

Alexander’s statement went on to say, “If this shallow, hurried and wholly partisan impeachment were to succeed, it would rip the country apart, pouring gasoline on the fire of cultural divisions that already exist.”

In summary: Trump is surely guilty. We don’t feel we can do anything about it. And anyway, it’s really the Democrats’ fault.

That view may be shared by a fair number of Republicans beyond the Senate.

Meanwhile, despite the vote against witnesses, the drip-drip-drip testimony-in-absentia of former national security adviser John Bolton continued, with another leak in the New York Times from his forthcoming book.

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This time, Bolton is reported to have written that Trump asked him directly in May 2019 to set up a meeting between Rudy Giuliani and the Ukrainian president so they could discuss the investigations. Reportedly present at that meeting was Pat Cipollone, who has been leading the president’s legal defence. Trump immediately denied any such meeting took place. The Senate may not get to weigh this evidence, but the American people will.

Which brings us to the one other point in Alexander’s statement: “The question then is not whether the president did it, but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did. I believe that the Constitution provides that the people should make that decision in the presidential election that begins in Iowa on Monday.”

It was always going to come down to this November’s election — that was obvious from the beginning. The Senate was never going to deliver the final verdict. That will come from American voters.

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