Former Nixon Presidential Library director: Senate GOP 'more enabling of an abusive president than expected'

The Senate will hear closing arguments in President Trump's impeachment trial Monday, and senators are expected to reject the impeachment articles, mostly along party lines, on Wednesday afternoon. The outcome of the impeachment trial was never in serious doubt — it would take 67 senators to convict Trump, if all senators voted — but Democrats narrowly lost a key vote Friday to subpoena former National Security Adviser John Bolton and other witnesses.

More information tying Trump to the Ukraine pressure scheme he was impeached over continues to emerge, but a handful of key Republicans say they already believe Trump did what he's accused of, it just wasn't serious enough to remove him from office, especially in an election year. Other Republicans embraced a shockingly broad argument about what a president can legally do in office put forward, then partly rescinded, by Trump defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

Historians and legal experts tell The Washington Post that Trump's acquittal will have serious long-term repercussions for the balance of power between Congress and the White House, lowering the bar for what future presidents can do.

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"The Republicans have embraced a theory that permits future abuses of power," historian Timothy Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, told the Post. "The outcome of acquittal was predictable ... but I'm afraid that this process in the Senate is more enabling of an abusive president than expected." Nixon wasn't impeached, but he's the only president forced out of office due to the likelihood of conviction in an impeachment trial.

"It is not hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party treats Donald Trump more like a king than a president," presidential historian Jon Meacham told the Post. "That was a central and consuming anxiety of the framers. It is a remarkable thing to watch the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan and the Bushes become an instrument of Donald Trump's. That's a massive historical story."