The impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the most polarizing president of our times, has finally commenced after three years of second-guessing.

Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has released his impeachment report with great fanfare, yet the fanfare is a distraction from what is a political reality television show in advance of the 2020 presidential election. And yet, Adam Schiff thinks he is doing much more than releasing a report. Moreover, he is the guardian of American democracy, the protector of our republic against an abusive president. Yet, his high-minded and pompous language is based off a lot of falsehoods.

Here’s a highlight from Schiff’s report: “In making the decision to move forward, we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president. Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the president welcomed and utilized.”

Schiff forgot to mention that Robert Mueller noted a clear link between Trump and Russia would have been disclosed by this time.

Instead, because they cannot impeach Trump on those grounds, they decided to move to the next most controversial thing, which was the president airing his grievances out loud, including what he thinks Ukraine did to his election campaign, to foreign leaders and in public.

Trump’s obsession with both his 2016 election victory and his reelection campaign is both healthy and counterintuitive. It appears that every policy decision of his administration, especially on immigration and trade, are designed to appeal to his base for 2020. And it is not appropriate for Trump to seek revenge against his political opponents through the spreading of false information and conspiracy theories.

The request the president made on his grievance call with President Volodmyr Zelensky of Ukraine – while wrong and inappropriate, was resisted by policymakers in Washington and was never implemented – withheld aid to Ukraine was released and was never tied to domestic political investigations. And other presidents have made inappropriate requests to former leaders, lest we forget Barack Obama’s promise to former Russian Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” when dealing with missile defense when he is free from the pressures of reelection.

With regard to one of those conspiracy theories, we do know that political leaders in Ukraine favored former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, likely because of President Trump’s occasionally favorable comments about Russia in the 2016 campaign. Yet, we also know there is no evidence that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help the former secretary of state, unlike the irrefutable fact that Russia interfered in the election to sow divisions in American society, with Mr. Trump being the candidate most likely to sow such divisions. And with regard to interference in American elections, lest we forget the Clinton-financed Steele dossier, and the hijacking of a Russian disinformation campaign by partisans in the Obama Administration (namely Brennan, Clapper and maybe even Comey) to undermine the Trump campaign.

The Democrats, who struck out three times with the Mueller Report, are now using a much more obscure instance that is not as consequential and includes a whole lot of hearsay to complete their three-year dream to impeach Donald Trump. A responsible political discourse would involve Democrats using the Trump-Ukraine events as campaign literature in arguing that the president’s incoherent foreign policy and poor judgement should deny his reelection, but instead, they choose to impeach him now. The consequences of their actions are clear.

In this political climate, the next president, whether he or she is a Democrat or a Republican, is sure to face an impeachment trial for whatever scandal, real or fabricated, makes the news. This is emphatically bad for the United States, for if people cannot trust their vote, what can they trust?

Greg DeLapi is a sophomore political science major from Babylon, New York.