Senators have voted to acquit Donald Trump of all charges and the US president will remain in office.

His impeachment trial ended without first hearing from witnesses or examining new documents, even though some Republicans agreed the president had done exactly what he was accused of. 

Only one Republican, Mitt Romney, wanted to convict Trump and only on one charge. No Democrat voted to acquit.

The Senate voted 52-48 to acquit him of abuse of power, and then 53-47 to acquit him of obstruction of Congress.

The votes fell far short of the two-thirds majority required in the 100-seat Senate to remove him under the US constitution.

A conviction on either count would have elevated vice president Mike Pence, another Republican, into the presidency.

Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate a political rival – former vice president Joe Biden – ahead of the 2020 election and blocked Congress in its efforts to investigate his actions. He has now has been given the OK by the Senate. 

He becomes the third president in US history to be acquitted after being impeached in the House.

But Trump has his own distinction: he is the only president to go through a Senate impeachment trial that heard from no witnesses. 

The outcome capped nearly five months of impeachment proceedings launched in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives, ending in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, and reflective of the nation’s unrelenting partisan divide three years into the Trump presidency.

Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, broke with his party to vote to convict Trump on the abuse-of-power charge.

Romney called the president’s actions in pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden “grievously wrong” and said Trump was “guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust”.

“What he did was not ‘perfect,’” Romney said on the Senate floor, as Trump has described his call with Ukraine’s president that was at the heart of the scandal.

“No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values.

“Corrupting an election to keep one’s self in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

Democrats expressed concern that an acquittal would further embolden a president who already challenges political norms.

They have painted him as threat to US democracy and a demagogue who has acted lawlessly and exhibited a contempt for the powers of Congress and other institutions.

They also have voiced concern over Russia interfering in another American election.