In a Swelling Age of Tribalism, The Trust of a Nation Teeters.

As President Trump faces impeachment by the House, it is the very concept of truth that often seems to be on trial.

PETER BAKER, NY TIMES

There are days in Washington lately when it feels like the truth itself is on trial. Monday was one of those days.

An impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill presented radically competing versions of reality. An F.B.I. inspector general report punctured longstanding conspiracy theories even as it provided ammunition for others. And a trove of documents exposed years of government deception about the war in Afghanistan.

While truth was deemed an endangered species in the nation’s capital long before President Trump’s arrival, it has become axiomatic in the era of “alternative facts” that each person or party entertains only their own preferred variant, resisting contrary information. Rarely has that been on display as starkly as on Monday, underscoring the deep distrust that many Americans harbor toward their leaders and institutions.

“We’re in a dangerous moment,” said Peter Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and a vocal critic of Mr. Trump. “The danger is people come to believe that nobody is giving them the facts and reality, and everybody can make up their own script and their own narrative.”

In such a situation, he added, “truth as a concept gets obliterated because people’s investment in certain narratives is so deep that facts simply won’t get in the way.”

Mr. Trump, whose myriad false statements and public lies have been extensively cataloged, hardly caused this phenomenon by himself, but he exemplifies it better than anyone else. He is the Rorschach test of truth, the guidepost by which people choose their story line. Most Americans tell pollsters that they do not believe what he says, but a significant minority considers him a truth-teller in a broader sense, saying out loud what others will not about a broken system he vows to fix, even if he does not hew to particular facts.

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Daniel S. Goldman, left, and Stephen R. Castor being sworn in for the impeachment hearing on Monday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

And in some ways, his what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach makes him more transparent about his motives and feelings than any president in generations. Rather than hide his more base reactions and ambitions, however raw and unseemly, he flaunts them and invites his supporters to share them.

With the help of social media, friendly news outlets and congressional Republicans willing to follow his lead, he crafts a message that finds its audience.

He took office at a time when trust was already a dwindling commodity in American life. Much of the public may not trust Mr. Trump, according to surveys, but it likewise does not trust his opponents all that much either — or the news media that he complains is out to get him. Americans have been down on banks, big business, the criminal justice system and the health care system for years, and fewer have confidence in churches or organized religion now than at any point since Gallup started asking in 1973.

“The story of the past half-century is the steady degradation of trust in the institutions and gatekeepers of American life,” said Ben Domenech, the founder of The Federalist, a conservative news site. “Everything from politics to faith to sports has been revealed as corrupted or corruptible. And every mismanaged war, failed hurricane response, botched investigation and doping scandal furthers this view.”

While a Quinnipiac Poll last spring found that Americans believed the news media more than Mr. Trump by a margin of 52 percent to 35 percent, other surveys showed a crisis among everyday people distinguishing fact from fiction in public life. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in a poll released last month by The Associated Press, the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts said they often came across one-sided information, and 47 percent said they had difficulty knowing if the information were true.

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Television crews on Monday outside the Justice Department.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

The documents on Afghanistan made public on Monday could easily deepen that sense of suspicion. Some 2,000 pages of secret notes and interview transcripts compiled as part of a lessons-learned project and released to The Washington Post after a court fight showed that the government had misled the public about the war since its early months.

As Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who was an adviser on Afghanistan to Mr. Bush and President Barack Obama, admitted in a secret interview included in the documents, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.” But neither administration admitted that to the public. John F. Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, told The Post that the documents showed “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

The F.B.I. inspector general report released on Monday typified the choose-your-own-reality nature of Washington these days. The report debunked Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories about the origins of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, finding no “political bias or improper motivation” in opening the inquiry. But the inspector general also found that the bureau made serious mistakes in seeking a surveillance warrant.

Former F.B.I. officials took the report as vindication because it dispelled the many unfounded claims Mr. Trump and his supporters advanced about the bureau even as they fretted that too many people would still believe the president’s assertions. “There is a risk we’ve become so numb to the lying that we move onto the next outrage,” the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, who was fired by Mr. Trump, said on CNN.

Likewise, the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing on Monday offered conflicting versions to suit either side’s predilections — either the story of an out-of-control president abusing his power to pressure a foreign government to help him take down his domestic rivals or a president who just happened to be concerned about corruption in faraway Ukraine and did not tie American aid to his political priorities even though some of his own advisers thought he did.

Mr. Trump’s insistence that he did nothing wrong has forced at least some Republicans to accept and promote his account even when it contrasts with available evidence. A Republican lawyer presenting the case to the committee on Monday went so far as to say that the evidence did not show that Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a now-famous July 25 phone call even though the White House’s own reconstructed transcript quoted him asking his counterpart to “look into it.”

Mr. Trump is hardly the first dissembler in the White House. Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon were famously talented liars, and Bill Clinton was the first president ever found by a court to have testified falsely under oath. But what Mr. Trump lacks in finesse, he makes up in volume. The Post’s fact-checking unit counted more than 13,000 false or misleading statements by Mr. Trump as of October.

The trials of truth have been a consistent theme of his presidency since its first day when he overstated his inaugural crowd size and within days falsely claimed that at least three million immigrants voted illegally against him, costing him the popular vote.

The culture of dishonesty has resulted in multiple people once in his inner circle pleading guilty or being convicted of lying to the authorities, including his onetime national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; his former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen; several campaign aides; and most recently, his longtime associate and sometime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., who was found guilty last month in a courthouse just across from the Capitol.

Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, made clear during testimony before Congress in September that he felt perfectly free to lie on television because, in his view, the news media itself was dishonest. “I have no obligation to have a candid conversation with the media whatsoever, just like they have no obligation to cover me honestly, and they do it inaccurately all the time,” he told lawmakers.

The president and his allies have sought to turn the tables on Democrats by accusing them of being the dishonest ones. Mr. Trump’s favorite target is Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which conducted the Ukraine inquiry in response to a C.I.A. whistle-blower.

Mr. Trump, who regularly accuses critics of whatever they have accused him of, has taken to calling the congressman “Shifty Schiff” and likewise complains that the parody he gave of Mr. Trump’s July 25 call to make a point was dishonest even though Mr. Schiff made clear it was not a verbatim rendering.

Democrats dismissed the attacks on Mr. Schiff as a false-equivalence effort to distract from the president’s own conduct. But they did not have Mr. Schiff present the evidence on Monday, leaving it to a lawyer instead, avoiding the distraction.

The attacks on Mr. Schiff and other Democrats give Mr. Trump and his supporters their own counternarrative amplified on conservative television and social media. By the end of Monday, each side took what it wanted from the day’s developments and drew the conclusions that best reflected its views.

“In an atomized age,” said Mr. Domenech, “that allows individuals to retreat to their own story lines, fantasies and tales in which their tribe is always good or under attack, and the other always craven and duplicitous.”

For Mr. Trump, that is a truth he can live with.

French Strike Aims to Save an Envied, but Convoluted, Approach to Pensions In France, train drivers can retire at 52, public utility workers at 57 and ballet dancers at 42. President Macron calls the tangle outdated and unsustainable. A million French protesters disagree.

Protesters on Thursday set a fire and confronted riot police near the Place de la République in Paris.Credit...Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

NY TIMES

By Liz Alderman

PARIS — Stéphane Vardon has worked as a conductor on France’s high-speed and suburban rail network for 20 years. It is hard work, he says, and he’d like to retire before he turns 58, a privilege he now fears President Emmanuel Macron is going to strip away.


So this week, when nearly one million French citizens demonstrated nationwide to protect pension benefits that are the envy of much of the world, Mr. Vardon, 46, was among them, marching through the streets of Paris.


“People will have to work longer and have less money for their retirement,” said Mr. Vardon, citing a common fear of Mr. Macron’s plans. “Macron isn’t close to the people. We know he won’t do anything for the workers.’’


While France’s official retirement age may be 62, the actual age varies widely across the country’s labyrinthine system. Train drivers can retire at 52, public electric and gas workers at 57, and members of the national ballet, who start dancing at a very young age, as early as age 42. That is to name just a few of the stark differences.


It is this sheer complexity that Mr. Macron has vowed to untangle, aiming to standardize 42 different public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan.


At stake in the continuing standoff — much of France remained shutdown on Friday — is nothing less than the future of the country’s vaunted social safety net.

Image “It won’t be enough to have a retirement where I can live well,” said Stéphane Vardon, a train conductor. Credit...Cyril Zannettacci for The New York Times

Elected in 2017, Mr. Macron has faced fierce strikes and street protests before as part of his attempts to add dynamism to France’s economy and make it more business friendly. But the pension overhaul is his biggest and most daunting test yet.


Unions are calling for another nationwide demonstration Tuesday, just before the government is scheduled to unveil fresh details of the pension overhaul. The transport strikes that incapacitated France this week have now been prolonged through early next week.


As Mr. Macron moves to overhaul the pension system, it is precisely workers like Mr. Vardon — those with the most generous ‘‘special schemes’’ — that he would like to address.


The country’s postwar retirement system was founded by Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who was intent on establishing a social safety net in 1946 following the liberation of France.


Amid the postwar tumult, he bowed to demands by France’s mainly Communist-led unions to let different professions control their pension plans.


Instead of a centralized system, railway workers oversaw their retirement system, as did sailors, lawyers, notaries, teachers and, eventually, even ballet dancers and actors.


Because of the arduous nature of some professions, workers could retire early, a framework that persists today.

A demonstration against the proposed pension reform in Paris on Thursday.Credit...Ian Langsdon/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Macron has called the tangle outdated, unfair and unsustainable. France spends a whopping 14 percent of its gross domestic product on the pension system, more than almost any European country.

The system is staring at a potential deficit of 19 billion euros by 2025 if no action is taken, according to a landmark report issued by France’s pension czar, Jean-Paul Delevoye.


So Mr. Macron says he wants to merge the disparate systems, public and private, into one state-managed system by 2025.


He also wants to keep the deficit from growing, which Patrick Artus, chief economist of Paris-based Natixis bank, said could be achieved if every worker works at least another six months before retiring.


Whether Mr. Macron can succeed in his plans is an open question. No French president has managed to achieve a radical overhaul of pensions.


Mr. Macron says he isn’t seeking to reduce France’s pension spending — a point the government hopes will placate protesters.


Nonetheless, the changes he has proposed could alleviate the burden of some of the most generous pensions, which falls heavily on the government.


To get there, Mr. Macron plans to pivot to a centrally managed points-based system similar to one used in Sweden, where workers accumulate points over the course of their careers and cash them in.


Mr. Macron says the system would be simpler and fairer, and would create better funding security for pensions as the population ages.

Riot police in Paris.Credit...Rafael Yaghobzadeh/Associated Press


Currently, the public pension fund is a pay as you go system that works like a group insurance, with workers and employers paying contributions from their income.


Pension benefits are currently calculated, in the private sector, based on a worker’s 25 highest earning years, and in the public sector on the last six months, when workers are likely to be at the height of their earning power.


Full pension benefits are earned after 41 to 43 years of contributions, depending on when workers were born, but workers can retire earlier, although those who do won’t get full benefits.


All workers are also required to pay into supplementary pension schemes to complement public pensions, which pay retirees an average of around 75 percent of pretax earnings — among the most generous in Europe, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.


The state would remain the main guarantor of pensions, continuing to provide workers with a safety net that is unheard-of in the United States, where about half of Americans have no access to retirement savings plans, and have little or nothing saved for retirement.


French unions say Mr. Macron’s plan is little more than smoke and mirrors and will benefit private-sector workers at the expense of teachers, railway workers, nurses, and other public-sector employees.


By valuing pensions on a lifetime of work, instead of the last six months, those in the public sector fear they will see their pensions slashed.

SNCF railway workers on strike at the Gare du Nord station.Credit...Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Mr. Vardon, the conductor, is among those worried about taking a hit. His base salary of 1,800 euros a month is enough for a decent pension under the current scheme.


But under the points system, his retirement check calculation would include the lower salaries he earned when he started working 20 years ago, so he’ll get less.


“It won’t be enough to have a retirement where I can live well,” he said.


As things stand, Mr. Vardon would like to retire at age 57 and a half, the threshold permitted by the national railway scheme.


In reality, he said, he will probably need to work until age 62 to reap his full pension. Mr. Macron’s changes could force him to work even longer — a thought that fills him with dread.

“We have difficult working conditions,” said Mr. Vardon, who assists passengers and manages work crews while maneuvering constantly on his feet as he crisscrosses the country at high speeds.

“We don’t eat at normal hours, we have short nights of sleep, which means that I am more tired and my body doesn’t have time to adapt,’’ he said. ‘‘I will age faster than someone who had a regular job Monday to Friday from nine to five.”


“Many of my colleagues died between the ages of 60 and 65,” he added, “So I’m worried I won’t make it.”


Economists agree that the biggest winners are likely to be private-sector employees. Because pension payments under the point system would be indexed to France’s nominal gross domestic product, private-sector workers will have their pensions revalued and likely revised up, said Mr. Artus.


“There will be winners and losers,” Mr. Artus said. While those losing out will face a painful transition, France’s overall pension system will be sounder in the long run, because a points system will make it easier to maintain balanced finances, he added.


A recent poll by Elabe, a French polling agency, shows that over half of French people are concerned the current pensions system isn’t sustainable. Still, the political challenges to streamlining it remain enormous.

The Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris on Friday.Credit...Thibault Camus/Associated Press


The demonstrations are likely to go on as long as the French fear their pensions might suffer or they will have to work longer under any new system. French presidents have tended to back down from reform efforts in the past in the face of fierce public resistance.

Mr. Vardon is among thousands who have vowed to continue the fight. While the demonstrations may look raucous to the outside world, “We want people to live without having to work longer to have a retirement,” he said.


“Yes, we have a good system, but we think our system should be a model,” he added. “It allows people who have accidents, who are poor, who didn’t have any luck in life, to climb the social ladder and to continue — after a long career — to live, to feed themselves, to take a well deserved rest.”


“It’s a shame that other countries don’t have this,” he said.


Melissa Godin contributed reporting.

Liz Alderman is the Paris-based chief European business correspondent, covering economic and inequality challenges around Europe. She was previously an assistant business editor, and spent five years as the business editor of what was The International Herald Tribune. @LizAldermanNYT

Why Democrats are moving so fast on impeachment

Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

VOX

Democrats officially announced their impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump a little over two months ago — and now, they sound quite ready to be done with it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that she was instructing committee chairs to draw up articles of impeachment. House leaders have signaled they hope to wrap up proceedings in their chamber before Congress leaves for the December holidays. That means they’d like to take a final vote on impeaching Trump in a little over two weeks.

And they’ve made clear they believe time is of the essence.

“We view this as urgent,” House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff said last week.

“They keep taking it to court and, no, we’re not going to wait till the courts decide,” Pelosi said. “We can’t wait for that.”

“Wouldn’t that be a great Christmas gift for it to all wrap up by Christmas?” Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) asked.

Behind this is a shared assumption among much of the Democratic caucus that it is very important that impeachment be wrapped up early in 2020, rather than continuing late into the year, closer to the election.

Where this urgency will lead seems clear: to a trial in the Senate that is all but certain to end in Trump’s acquittal and continuance in office. So it’s worth unpacking what’s behind this need for speed.

One likely explanation is that the outcome already seems set. Republicans have remained united behind Trump, meaning there’s no hope of getting a supermajority of 67 senators to remove him from office. So why prolong the inevitable?

A quick impeachment vote — besides a symbolic reprimand for Trump that would soon be followed by his Senate acquittal — would allow Democrats to move on to other matters.

And that may be what they want. The real purpose behind this haste appears to be political. Democratic leaders appear to think that staying on impeachment too long would be bad for them politically — or at least that it would be bad for the Democrats in swing districts on whom Pelosi’s majority depends.

Why Democratic leaders were always wary of impeachment

After months in which House Democrats were torn over the political wisdom of impeaching President Trump, the Ukraine scandal brought peace to the land. After an intelligence community whistleblower raised alarms that Trump was attempting to strong-arm Kyiv to interfere in the 2020 election in his favor, all but two members of the caucus came together in support of an effort that, it was immediately clear, would likely result in Trump’s impeachment.

But there were reasons Democratic leaders had been wary of impeachment all year and tried to stave it off despite intense pressure from their base.

For one, there was what they saw as the inevitable endpoint: If they did impeach Trump in the House, he’d be acquitted by the GOP-controlled Senate. Due to the supermajority requirement for removal, at least 20 Republicans would have to break ranks to oust Trump. They knew that was never remotely likely and that, as a result, the impeachment quest would ultimately end in failure.

What’s unfolded over the past few months has only confirmed that judgment: Just one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), has broken with Trump over the Ukraine scandal. And even his break is mild — an open mind, not an outright condemnation. If others are considering breaking with the president, they’ve been very quiet about it.

Beyond that, Democratic leaders hesitated because impeachment didn’t poll well. More than 50 percent of voters tended to oppose it in polls, as you can see in this FiveThirtyEight tracker.

That turned around somewhat in late September after the Ukraine scandal broke and after Pelosi backed an impeachment inquiry and signaled Democratic unity. So the current situation is that a narrow plurality of voters now favors impeachment.

But that brings us to the next problem for Democrats: the House map. Though Trump lost the nationwide popular vote to Clinton by 2 percentage points in 2016, he won 228 House districts to her 207. So, under the current map, Democrats need to elect some members from districts Trump won or they can’t get the 218 seats necessary for a majority. Currently, they have 35 members in districts Trump won.

These members’ preferences have dictated Pelosi’s strategy and decision making all year, because her majority mathematically depends on them. And eventually, the vast majority of these members did come around to support an impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine scandal, meaning Pelosi soon followed.

Since then, though, Politico’s Sarah Ferris and Ally Mutnick report that some vulnerable Democrats have been “spooked” and “watching in horror” as pro-Trump groups have bombarded their districts with anti-impeachment ads. Others are desperately hoping to win some bipartisan cred by helping Trump enact a trade deal. Impeachment is still not a comfortable place for these Democrats to be.

What’s the purpose of an impeachment inquiry when Senate Republicans already have their minds made up?

With all of that in mind as background, it’s worth interrogating what, exactly, this current impeachment inquiry is meant to achieve. Because there are several possible aims, some that would be better served by a longer inquiry and others that wouldn’t.

1. Investigate the scandal

One evident purpose of this impeachment inquiry was to gather facts and learn more about what happened between Trump and Ukraine.

And so far, Democrats have had a great and somewhat unexpected amount of success in this. Seventeen current or former officials gave sworn testimony, and one witness — Kurt Volker — handed over a treasure trove of text messages documenting efforts to get Ukraine to agree to a quid pro quo.

Yet there’s still much that remains unresolved. Key witnesses like National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General Bill Barr haven’t testified. Government agencies haven’t handed over any documents. These witnesses and documents could tell unknown parts of the story about what happened and could theoretically strengthen an impeachment case further.

The problem is that getting them would entail court battles that could take months and may end in failure. So Democrats have decided to declare victory and say they already have enough evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing to move forward. They also argue that new information is unlikely to change Republican senators’ minds at this point — which, fair enough.

But their decision to cut off the investigation here is largely being governed by an artificial timeline based on the assumption that impeachment “has to” be wrapped up quickly. They don’t know what other evidence is out there or what a prolonged investigation might turn up. And if they finish the inquiry now, they’ll lose an important argument that has had some success at winning over judges already — that they’re in the midst of exercising their constitutional powers with an impeachment inquiry.

So it seems that if their goal was really to get to the bottom of what happened, making as strong a case as possible, they’d keep going. But they aren’t.

2. Stand up for the rule of law

Another purpose of the impeachment effort is to defend the rule of law by standing up to an abuse of power by President Trump.

This is what has motivated many Democratic activists and what may have finally spurred moderates assessing the Ukraine scandal to finally get off the fence: the idea that Trump has gone too far and that impeachment is the only remedy. That Trump has committed egregious misconduct so he must be sanctioned for it. It’s that simple.

If your goal is just to reprimand Trump for an abuse of power by impeaching him, then of course that goal will be served by, well, impeaching him, and whether it’s done quickly or slowly doesn’t matter all that much.

The problem is what happens afterward in the Senate. If Trump is easily acquitted, as appears likely, on something close to a party-line vote in the Senate, it’s unclear whether the rule of law will have been defended at all. Then, if Trump is reelected after being impeached, he’ll be vindicated further.

Impeachment supporters would respond to this by asking, well, what should we do, nothing? And there’s no good answer. The best they can hope for may be a symbolic reprimand of Trump.

3. Try to actually remove Trump from office

Still, Democrats of a particularly optimistic persuasion might be holding onto hope that a political earthquake will actually happen, that the impeachment inquiry just might remove Trump from office after all, however unlikely that may seem. And it seems ... very unlikely, given that 67-vote requirement and Republican unity.

4. Damage Trump politically

Another purpose of the impeachment inquiry could well be to hurt Trump’s political standing in the hope of making his election in 2020 less likely. Despite all the high-minded rhetoric about the rule of law, this is politics, after all.

And, importantly, this goal could theoretically be achieved regardless of what Republicans do in the Senate. If Democrats feel that the GOP won’t stand up for the rule of law, an impeachment inquiry could be a tool to try and urge the voters to stand up for it in November 2020.

The problem here, as mentioned above, is the House map. It is possible that something can be bad politically for both Trump and for those crucial House Democrats in Trump-supporting districts as well — Democrats who generally hope to stress their moderation and areas of agreement with Trump, not their disagreements with him.

And Pelosi has clearly calculated that a focus on impeachment is bad for those Democrats and, accordingly, bad for her chances of remaining speaker.

Theoretically, if an impeachment inquiry damages Trump, it could hurt Republicans and help Democrats across the country, even those in tough districts. But so far, it’s not clear that Trump has been hurt by the inquiry — his approval rating is essentially unchanged from where it was before the scandal broke. (Opinion on impeachment has moved, but overall opinion on Trump hasn’t moved.) And, as mentioned, those swing district Democrats are feeling the heat.

5. Just get it over with

Finally, there’s one other possible purpose for this whole impeachment inquiry effort, which may come off as cynical but arguably explains Democratic leaders’ behavior better than anything else.

That is: The reason for moving ahead with impeachment now is to at long last dispense with the base’s unceasing demand for impeachment.

But the demands kept coming, and once the Ukraine scandal broke, she agreed to move ahead. Now, it’s clear that the only way to get Democratic voters to stop demanding Trump’s impeachment is to actually impeach him. And, in this line of thinking, the sooner the better. All year, Pelosi’s new majority has been under pressure from activists and certain of its members to move forward with impeaching Trump. All year, she has believed impeachment is a political loser and that Trump’s acquittal is certain. All year, she has been trying to stave this off.

That will kick things over to the Senate, which will acquit Trump. That is, after all, how this thing was always going to end. And then Democrats can, at long last, move on to something else.

Impeachment supporters will cry foul here. They will say that only if impeachment was done differently — perhaps with more months of hearings, perhaps by exploring topics other than Ukraine, perhaps with more effective Democratic leadership — it could have succeeded.

Perhaps. But the way things have played out so far is quite close to what Pelosi would have predicted. Voters’ opinions about Trump have remained remarkably entrenched, as they have for the past two years. And congressional Republicans haven’t abandoned him, which means he’s here to stay.

The impeachment investigation wasn’t a sham —far from it. It surfaced new information and helped nail down the facts of an apparent abuse of power by the president of the United States. It will likely result in a historic reprimand of Trump’s conduct as he becomes the third president ever to be impeached. But those who had greater expectations will probably end up disappointed.