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While Trump remains only the third president to be impeached by the House, the vote by the Senate - 52-48 on abuse of power and 53-47 on obstruction - means he can remain in the White House and seek a second term.
Both Bill Clinton in 1999 and Andrew Johnson in 1868 drew cross-party support when they were left in office after impeachment trials. Richard Nixon resigned rather than face sure impeachment, expecting members of his own party to vote to remove him.
“The sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J Trump. As we have said all along, he is not guilty,” the White House said yesterday in a statement. “The Senate voted to reject the baseless articles of impeachment, and only the president’s political opponents - all Democrats, and one failed Republican presidential candidate - voted for the manufactured impeachment articles.
“In what has now become a consistent tradition for Democrats, this was yet another witch-hunt that deprived the president of his due process rights and was based on a series of lies.”
While Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell called the decision to pursue the president's impeachment over the Ukraine affair was a "colossal political mistake" by the Democrats, minority leader Chuck Schumer said there will always be "a giant asterisk next to the president's acquittal" because of the Senate's quick trial and Republicans' unprecedented rejection of witnesses.
Ahead of Wednesday's voting, some of the most closely watched senators took to the Senate floor to tell their constituents, and the nation, what they had decided.
Influential Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee worried a guilty verdict would "pour gasoline on the fire" of the nation's culture wars over Trump and "rip the country apart." He said the House proved its case but it just didn't rise to the level of impeachment.
Other Republicans siding with Trump said it was time to end what McConnell called the "circus" and move on.
Most Democrats, though, echoed the House managers' warnings that Trump, if left unchecked, would continue to abuse the power of his office for personal political gain and try to cheat again ahead of the the 2020 election. Even key Democrats from states where Trump is popular - Doug Jones in Alabama and Joe Manchin in West Virginia - risked backlash and voted to convict. "Senators are elected to make tough choices," Jones said.
Several senators trying to win the Democratic Party's nomination to face Trump - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar - dashed back from early primary state New Hampshire to vote.
During the nearly three-week trial, House Democrats prosecuting the case argued that Trump abused power like no other president in history when he pressured Ukraine to investigate his domestic challenger Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, ahead of the 2020 election.
They detailed an extraordinary effort by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that set off alarms at the highest levels of government. After the president's 25 July call with Ukraine, the White House temporarily halted $391m (£302m in US aid to the struggling ally battling hostile Russia at its border. The money was eventually released in September as Congress intervened.
When the House probed Trump's actions, the president instructed White House aides to defy congressional subpoenas, leading to the obstruction charge.
Questions from the Ukraine matter continue to swirl. House Democrats may yet summon former national security adviser John Bolton to testify about revelations from his forthcoming book that offer a fresh account of Trump's actions. Other eyewitnesses and documents are almost sure to surface.
In closing arguments for the trial, the lead prosecutor, Adam Schiff, appealed to senators' sense of decency, insisting "right matters" and "truth matters" and Trump "is not who you are." He said he hoped the votes to convict "will serve as a constraint on the president's wrongdoing" but warned: "We're going to have to be vigilant."
Here's John T Bennett's report from a dark day for democracy in Washington.