Nancy Pelosi ensures Democrat brand is in shreds, while Donald Trump’s is stronger than ever

Nancy Pelosi’s petty and silly act demonstrates that the Democrats are guilty of all the sins they accuse the US President of being guilty of.

Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, right, and Nancy Pelosi tearing up her copy of the US President's speech. Picture:

Donald Trump is stronger than ever and the generic Democrat brand is trending down.

Except for a vindictive payback gesture from Mitt Romney, whom Trump it must be said had needlessly and foolishly humiliated a number of times in the past, the process and the vote played out in an entirely partisan fashion.

The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is surely right to pronounce Pelosi’s strategy “a colossal failure”.

There is only one sense in which Pelosi may have minimised damage to her own side. She had been cautious about impeachment, broadly against it.

But the activist base of the Democratic Party, who would regard Trump as the devil himself if they held religious beliefs, were increasingly demanding impeachment. There was a danger that supporting impeachment might become a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates.

So Pelosi at least got the thing out of the way quickly. There was no chance Trump would ever be convicted in a Senate trial. In the House proceedings, Pelosi did not try to go to court to compel White House witnesses to testify.

That would have delayed the proceedings and Pelosi, if she is smarter than she looks, probably wanted the whole impeachment business out of the way sooner rather than later.

So she had to make a show of trying impeachment for her base.

Some Machiavellians even believe she organised the trial for January so that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the two most left wing candidates in the Democratic primary, would be kept away from the campaign trail.

The vote total, 53-47 for not guilty, on the second article of impeachment, obstruction of congress, is displayed on screen during the impeachment trial against US President Donald Trump.

It didn’t do much good as Sanders won the most votes, though Pete Buttigieg won the most delegates, in the catastrophically mismanaged Iowa caucuses.

There were two views of the likely political consequences of the impeachment process.

Some millions of Americans vote for Trump but are deeply uneasy about some of the things he says and does.

There’s no doubt Trump behaved badly in the Ukraine matter, but not in a way that remotely justifies removal from office by impeachment.

The Democrats thought impeachment proceedings would remind Americans of what they don’t like about Trump.

In fact the politics ran the other way and validated the view that impeachment would end up hurting the Democrats. Public support for impeachment declined as the process went on. Trump’s approval ratings rose. The president now has the highest approval ratings of his presidency.

This may be extremely temporary, but for the moment Republicans as a brand enjoy greater approval than Democrats as a brand.

That suggests that the obvious cynicism and dishonesty of the impeachment process has hurt the Democrats much more than the ongoing ventilating of material vaguely damaging to Trump.

Pelosi tearing up Trump’s speech was petty and silly but it must be acknowledged that Trump himself often engages in petty and silly gestures, such as refusing to shake Pelosi’s hand. Pelosi’s partisans think she’s a hero, Trump’s partisans think she was churlish.

But Pelosi amply demonstrates that the Democrats are guilty of all the sins they accuse Trump of being guilty of.

The difference is that as president Trump also gets some things done which people like.