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two conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He replaced federal officials with ones who would favor private schools over public schools, or remove regulations on water pollution. He encouraged harsh treatment, such as separating children from their parents, of immigrants from Latin America.

Russia, it turned out, had tried to interfere in the 2016 US election. This was the conclusion of the FBI and the CIA, but Trump pooh-poohed it. At a summit meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Trump asked if they had tried to interfere. Putin said no, and Trump seemed to take his word for it. President Trump acted friendly, even admiringly, toward Putin. He also praised the brutal dictators Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

In 2017 the Republicans had majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and this seemed like their chance to accomplish all their conservative goals at once. Soon after Trump’s inauguration, the Republicans in Congress launched a bill meant to kill the Affordable Care Act. They called the legislation “Repeal and Replace,” but in fact it would take medical insurance away from many millions of Americans. When a pared-down version of “Repeal and Replace” came up for approval in the Senate in July, it seemed sure to pass. Biden’s Republican friend Senator John McCain didn’t like the bill, but he was home in Arizona, undergoing surgery.

But McCain, like the Bidens, was a tough man to keep down. After the surgery, he flew to Washington and walked onto the Senate floor with stitches over his right eye—and voted thumbs-down on “Repeal and Replace” to break a tie vote. Biden must have appreciated his friend’s dramatic moment in the political spotlight, but he also felt the pain of his bad news. John McCain, like Joe’s son Beau, had an especially malignant form of brain cancer, and he would die the next year.

In the congressional elections of 2018, a strong reaction against President Trump’s policies helped Democrats, especially women, take back the House of Representatives. But Senator Mitch McConnell, who had worked tirelessly for the previous ten years against the goals of Obama’s administration, was still majority leader of the Senate. When the House sent bills to the Senate for approval, McConnell refused to even let them come up for debate. Because he killed so many bills this way, he got the nickname “the Grim Reaper.”

On April 25, 2019, Joe Biden announced that he was running for president in 2020. He was joining an already crowded Democratic field: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Senator Kamala Harris of California, to name only a few. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was also running again. In total, twenty-nine Democratic candidates would declare.

As soon as Biden declared, questions arose about whether he was physically fit, at his age, to run for president. He got a dubious endorsement from Dr. Neal Kassell, the brain surgeon who had operated on Biden’s aneurysms in 1988. He joked, “Joe Biden of all of the politicians in Washington is the only one that I’m certain has a brain, because I have seen it. That’s more than I can say about all the other candidates or the incumbents.”

The Democratic debates began on June 26, 2019, when the polls showed Joe Biden as the Democratic front-runner. In that debate, Senator Kamala Harris of California made news for her dramatic attack on Biden. “I do not believe you are a racist,” she began. But she went on to reproach him for voting in the Senate in the 1970s against public-school busing. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Biden looked shocked, and when he answered Harris, he seemed defensive and off-balance. Jill was shocked too. It “felt like a punch in the gut,” she said later.

Over the course of the following debates, other candidates accused Biden of clinging to Obamacare, a flawed health care program; of being beholden to the credit card industries in Delaware for donations; of voting for the Iraq War in 2002; and in general of not being the “new blood” that the Democratic Party needed.

They pointed out the harm done by the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act and the crime reform laws of 1994. And Biden had to admit that the harsh drug laws, resulting in huge prison populations, had been a mistake. The critics brought up many of Biden’s numerous slips of the tongue, including the time he called Obama “clean” and “articulate.”

In spite of all these attacks, Biden remained the Democratic front-runner through the rest of 2019. And Donald Trump must have believed that Joe Biden was his most dangerous rival, because he tried to slander Biden as corrupt, as using his political power to benefit himself. During the summer of 2019, Trump pressured the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joe and his son Hunter for supposed wrongdoing in that country.

It was true that Hunter Biden had served on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, from 2014 to April 2019. It was true that Burisma had paid Hunter as much as $50,000 a month. But it was not true that Joe Biden had used his influence in Ukraine to protect his son from investigation.

Trump’s effort to pressure a foreign government to harm a political rival became public in September 2019. The Democratic-majority House of Representatives began an investigation that led to President Trump’s impeachment on December 18. The House accused him of “abuse of power”—asking a foreign government to help his reelection—and “obstruction of Congress”—refusing to let White House officials testify or turn over documents. The case then moved to the Senate for trial, and without calling witnesses, the Republican-majority Senate voted on February 5, 2020, to acquit the president on both charges.

Impeachment

The Constitution states that the House of Representatives may impeach a president—bring