The Senate impeachment trial is supposed to be a done deal. So what’s an opinion editor to do?

This week, Donald Trump’s impeachment trial began in the Senate – and nobody could bring themselves to get excited. It’s a done deal, everyone complained: there is a sizeable majority of Republicans in the Senate so there’s no way the president can be found guilty and actually removed from office. In the same vein, because of the large Democrat majority in the House of Representatives, it was hardly a surprise when the lower chamber voted for impeachment and sent its articles up to the Senate.

What should we take from this long and drawn-out impeachment process, then, if it’s really just about going through the motions? As Voices editor of The Independent’s US content, it’s my job to parse out the interesting angles and the little-known implications of what’s happening in Washington DC, even when it seems like it’s predictable. When I came in on Monday, I had an initial conversation with Noah Berlatsky, one of my writers, who told me that he wasn’t interested in following the granularities of the impeachment trial – but he was interested in whether or not the US would get a fair election in November. The way Republicans act during the trial, he argued, and the narrative they built would tell us a lot about Trump’s strategic moves for re-election in the months to come. In a Voices piece here, Noah elaborates on that premise, and he makes a convincing argument.