Trump Remains a Former President!
The ‘most bipartisan impeachment verdict in American history’ serves as an important marker for how bipartisan would be the opposition to any fundamental change away from the main drift of American politics. While it was a technical win for the president — in that Trump was ‘acquitted’ — as well as for common sense, the strength of the opposition to him serves as a warning to all who seek to oppose the technocratic/plutocratic advance of the Democratic Party and of a large segment of the Republican political elite.
A majority of senators voted to remove a former president from office. The absurdity of that marks the real significance of the event.
Our political class is ruling scared. They are deathly afraid of opposition. In their panic they have driven themselves crazy.
And so lightly provoked! Were I to get my way, they wouldn’t be ruling scared, they would be running.
twv
Addendum: The inane defiance, during the Trump years, of those American Democrats — the kind of people who would shout “not my president!’ — went witless in this second impeachment. I am reminded of Chevy Chase’s oft-repeated quip, ‘Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.’ Had the House Democrats succeeded in the Senate, Donald John Trump would have remained a former president. Their former president, presumably, so insanely attached to the presidency are these flaccid noodle-brains.
No president is my president. For the United States President is not the People’s — what is presided over is the union of states, not us, the citizenry. If you think of a president as “yours,” I sadly shake my head at your inverted values and political mindset.
Wirkman Comment 
There are two interesting interpretations of what the Democrats were doing. My interpretation squares with what I take to be yours — that the Democrats were driven by rage or by something like rage. But a rival suggestion is that they are trying to keep Trump relevant, on a theory that he will do more harm than good to Republican chances. Of course, in 2016 the mainstream of the media worked to secure Trump’s nomination on a very similar theory.
I find it fascinating that the Democrats must proceed for the next four years without the assurance that the Republicans will nominate a Romney.
By the way, the very first time that I heard someone claim that the elected President were not his-or-hers was in 1988 or ’89, when Paula Poundstone jocularly claimed that GHW Bush were not hers, and that she’d listen instead to “the other guy” (Michael Stanley Dukakis).
In late 2016, an episode of Supergirl aired in which a character modelled on Hillary Clinton was elected President; one of the supposedly heroic state officials inflicted a bit of torture on another character for declaring that the Clinton-analogue were “not my President”.