President Trump Impeached By U.S Congress.

House lawmakers voted to impeach President Trump on Wednesday in only the third such rebuke in American history.

The move triggers a trial for Trump in the Senate, expected in January — one in which majority Republicans are likely to permit him to retain his office.

The vote was 230 to 197 on the first of two articles of impeachment — abuse of power — with one member voting present. The House then passed the second article — obstruction of Congress — with a vote of 229 to 198, with one member voting present.

The vote was largely along party lines. Every Republican opposed impeachment.

The sole independent in the House, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, voted with Democrats.

Two House Democrats — Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — opposed Article 1. A third Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, joined Peterson and Van Drew to oppose Article 2.

Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who is running for president, voted present on both articles.

The House vote follows months of talk by Democrats about impeaching Trump and investigations that deepened profound political division across the country.

Discussions accelerated in September after the discovery that Trump wanted Ukraine to conduct investigations that could help him in the 2020 election.

The White House froze some $391 million in military aid for Ukraine for a time this year but ultimately released it; Ukraine’s leaders never agreed to launch investigations that Trump wanted into the 2016 election and the family of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump and Republicans said what they called the absence of any real exchange meant there was no crime. In fact, they have argued, the president was doing his duty to investigate what they called “corruption” in a nation long troubled by it.

For Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump was caught red-handed in the middle of a shakedown, conditioning dollars appropriated by Congress and his own official acts — an Oval Office meeting — on political favors.

What’s more, Democrats argue, Trump obstructed Congress by frustrating its investigation of the Ukraine affair.

The tumultuous frenzy of political life in the Trump era means that it isn’t clear how much the events of late 2019 and early 2020 might resonate with voters by the time they cast ballots in the presidential election on Nov. 3.

But the pending election figured prominently in all sides’ commentary about whether and how the House should take up impeachment, a question that also fractured Democrats after they gained a majority in the 2018 midterm elections.

But Pelosi resisted her most anti-Trump members’ desire to impeach, uneasy about the problems that this might cause in the 2020 elections for members in districts that previously had supported Trump.

Revelations about the Ukraine affair, however, convinced so many Democrats that Pelosi, too, got on board, and the chamber voted on Oct. 31 to formally authorize an inquiry.

Trump and his supporters say Democrats despair so badly about their slate of 2020 presidential candidates that they want to nullify the election before it happens by impeaching and attempting to remove Trump.

The president told supporters at a rally in Michigan on Wednesday night that his opponents were ignoring all his success in order to try to hound him from office.

“It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached,” Trump said. “The country is doing better than ever before. We did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong. And we have tremendous support in the Republican Party like we’ve never had before.”