Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Monday, February 10th, 2020.

I'm John Pajor, it's the editor of commentary with me as always Abe Greenwald senior editor,

hi Abe, hi John, Noah Rothman associate editor, hi Noah, hi John, and in Washington,

senior writer, Christine Rosen, hi Christine, hi John. Okay, so we have two main things to talk about

today. We have the acquittal of Donald John Trump and the Friday massacre supposedly of various

people involved in the accusations against Trump relating to Ukraine or the testimony,

and we have the Democrats coming up on the second vote after the Iowa debacle in New Hampshire

tomorrow night. So I'm not sure where we should begin, we can't even connect the two except to say that

for months on this podcast and certainly when the Ukraine story first started, I have, I was arguing that

impeachment was bad for Trump even though it was clear he was going to get acquitted, right?

It might cost him a point exactly where he couldn't lose a point and

remind the suburban Republicans who went Democratic in 2018 and helped bring about this 40-seat shift

to the Democrats in the House, what it was they didn't like about him, and that would be bad,

and I was wrong because every piece of data that we can look at would suggest that Trump was

strengthened rather than hurt during the months of the impeachment process. Now it may not be related

to impeachment, it may largely be related to the economy, but it's not like you can look at this

and then say that the impeachment was injurious in the most pressing piece of evidence,

which I think is really staggering is that they raised on impeachment, meaning emails relating to

impeachment various other things, $125 million. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign both

in hard money, $125 million, which is about, I don't know, like four times what all the Democrats raised

altogether, including all the campaigns and the Democratic National Committee and the campaign

committees. So no injury, maybe this whole thing about how presidents are going to be impeached

...