As the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump unfolds, it’s impossible to overstate the damage this one thoroughly unqualified political outsider has wrought on this country, its most basic democratic principles and its ethical standards.

The decision of President Joe Biden’s intelligence experts to deny Trump access to the new administration’s most critical secret information says all that is necessary to measure the real and potential threat in Trump’s continued involvement in American affairs, particularly as they may involve the nation’s foreign policy.

Trump’s absence now from the international scene as a discredited, twice-impeached head of state has brought a collective sigh of relief from across the globe. This is especially so among populations of foreign lands who still dream of reaching our shores someday.

Biden’s early plans to invigorate immigration to our shores, including the restoration of children separated from their incoming parents during the Trump presidency, serve to keep alive the flame of their aspirations. Equally reassuring are the new president’s declarations of fealty to the pillars of solidarity with the Western alliance, shaken by Trump’s assaults on NATO and his exotic bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Here at home, a bizarre spectacle unfolded in the American president coming out of the White House and in explicit terms inciting his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol, where they staged a mass insurrection against the legislative branch. Thousands of National Guard troops had to be rushed there as voices in the mob called for assassination of legislators, who were obliged to flee or hide. One Capitol police officer was killed and dozens were injured; four other people died in the riot.

Amid the chaos, a newly elected Republican House member, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, soon emerged as a new face of the insurrection, with her own history of violent right-wing incitement and bigotry, facts that others in her party tried to look away from. When they did so, some House Democrats felt obliged to strip her of committee assignments they felt would have given her a further platform for spewing her venom.

It is in this atmosphere of almost unparalleled bitterness and division in peacetime that Biden has been pleading in vain for a return to bipartisanship in Congress. Instead, he has opted to play hardball, invoking his razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate in an attempt to enact his huge $9.1 trillion relief bill amid the raging public-health pandemic and a frozen economy.

He argues that nothing less is required to jump-start the stalled domestic economy than sending $2,000 checks to the millions in distress, a notion that may be politically appealing even to Republicans traditionally opposed to huge deficit pending. Some Democratic allies harken back to much smaller payouts in the Obama years that fell far short of the need then, when Biden as vice president led the economic recovery response to the Great Recession.

This push to lift the country out its current morass is being undertaken as the impeachment trial gets underway, reminding the nation of the disaster from which it is only now emerging, after Trump’s woeful neglect of the people’s business over the last four years.

With more than enough Republicans sitting as his judges in the Senate, Trump’s acquittal seems certain. If so, it will put an unsatisfying end to one of the nation’s most shameful and regrettable detours from its proud history. Meanwhile, a new president strives to set it back on its more credible and admirable course abroad, with no easy path ahead as old partisan differences remain.

Nevertheless, history demands that the Trump abuse of America’s highest office be thoroughly documented, lest it be repeated by him or another future political impostor glib of tongue.

You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.