The impeachment of President Trump in 2020 succeeded, in the sense that he was impeached. And it failed, in the sense that it was a waste of what could have been a serious and significant opportunity.
That was my relatively uninformed view at the time. I found a far better-informed statement of this view in the Epilogue of John Bolton’s (2020) Room Where It Happened:
My substantive views on the impeachment process were decidedly mixed. Most important, from the very outset of proceedings in the House of Representatives, advocates for impeaching Trump on the Ukraine issue were committing impeachment malpractice. They seemed governed more by their own political imperatives to move swiftly to vote on articles of impeachment in order to avoid interfering with the Democratic presidential nomination schedule than in completing a comprehensive investigation. Such an approach was not serious constitutionally. If Trump deserved impeachment and conviction, the American public deserved a serious and thorough effort to justify the extraordinary punishment of removing an elected president from office. That did not happen. The Democrats’ perceived imperatives posed by the electoral calendar may have raised hard political questions and difficult logistical problems for impeachment advocates, but that was their own fault. Their self-imposed scheduling limitations hardly rose to a constitutional level at all, let alone one equivalent to impeaching a President, one of Congress’s gravest Constitutional responsibilities. Neither did scheduling issues justify the subsequent tactical decisions by the impeachment proponents, such as not pursuing subpoena enforcement actions in court, or otherwise building not just an “adequate” evidentiary record, but a compelling one. Indeed, in some senses it was a mirror image of what impeachment advocates were accusing Trump of doing: torquing legitimate governmental powers around an illegitimate nongovernmental objective.
The consequences of this partisan approach by the House were twofold. First, it narrowed the scope of the impeachment inquiry dramatically and provided no opportunity to explore Trump’s ham-handed involvement in other matters—criminal and civil, international and domestic—that should not properly be subject to manipulation by a President for personal reasons (political, economic, or any other). … A President may not misuse the national government’s legitimate powers by defining his own personal interest as synonymous with the national interest, or by inventing pretexts to mask the pursuit of personal interest under the guise of national interest. Had the House not focused solely on the Ukraine aspects of Trump’s confusion of his personal interests (whether political or economic), but on the broader pattern of his behavior—including his pressure campaigns involving Halkbank, ZTE, and Huawei among others—there might have been a greater chance to persuade others that “high crimes and misdemeanors” had been perpetrated. …
Second, rushed proceedings, combined with the hysterical mood of many impeachment advocates, which brooked no dissent from the proposition that Trump had to be removed from office by any means available, meant that developing a truly accurate record—at a minimum, a full record—was not an option House Democrats wanted to pursue. In turn, this resulted, quite literally, in driving away House Republicans who might have been inclined at least to consider articles of impeachment involving broader aspects of Trump’s conduct. From the very earliest days of the House proceedings, that meant that the entire affair would be bitterly partisan, which is exactly what it turned out to be. … And what was true of the House was equally true in the Senate, meaning that lines were drawn on party grounds, making Trump’s acquittal in the Senate a certainty even before the final House votes to impeach. This scenario was not inevitable ab initio, but it was made so by the conscious decisions of the House impeachment advocates.
That is malpractice pure and simple. And that’s how I saw it almost from the outset.
What Bolton describes within the timeframe of his service in the White House, I would trace back to a beginning in November 2016. Democrats were outraged that they didn’t get their way in the election. As if to make sure that the world would perceive them as spoiled children, they proceeded to throw a tantrum — not just stupidly proclaiming “Not My President!” as if wishing could make it so, but making clear to everyone that they were going to spend the next four years trying to get their way after all — that is, avidly exploring every possible rationale for getting rid of Trump as soon as possible. And none of it worked. For years on end, the Democrats’ antics enthralled a clueless horde breathlessly following people like Rachel Maddow, but they did not actually accomplish anything in the real world.
The malpractice charade was virtually inevitable: sooner or later, the Democrats were almost certain to seize upon some kind of excuse. The public reacted predictably: behaviors by Trump that would have shocked us became normalized, not just because they kept happening, but because there were no adults on the opposite side, capable of distinguishing Things That Upset Us from Things That Are Important. The Democratic Party simply refused to learn from the 2016 election that it was time to grow up.
The American System 
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