In a wonderful book I'm reading:  Reader Come Home by Maryanne Wolf, she writes about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, who joined in two futile attempts to assassinate Adolph Hitler, was arrested, and eventually executed just a few days before the American liberation.

Going to prison camp, "he took The Bible, Goethe, and Plutarch to accompany him...and wrote a book:  "Letters and Papers From Prison."

He wrote:  If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seem actually to be a psychological and sociological law:  the power of some needs the folly of the others.  It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

Ergo:  "Deprived of their independent judgment" Senators, casting the folly-vote, acquitted a guilty, power-hungry, power-displaying President Trump.

I wonder if he had beforehand, rather than afterwards, displayed the banner which suggested he could be President until 2080, the vote might have been different.