At this point, it feels safe to say that the Democrats will be able to lay out an airtight case that the president directed a secretive effort to subvert the 2020 elections by putting corrupt pressure on the government of Ukraine to gin up fake investigations about Joe Biden and his son. Currently, the GOP’s defense and that of the president are somewhat at odds: the president and his most vociferous defenders in the House essentially deny the reality of the accusations, while some GOP senators are reeling under the blows of reality and are trying to spin the known facts into an exonerating narrative.
So the president has repeatedly tweeted that the transcript of his infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zerensky is flawless and beautiful, and is all anyone needs to read in order to grasp his blinding innocence: this despite the fact that any plain reading of the document shows him exerting corrupt pressure on the Ukrainian president and making plentiful allusions to the larger scheme that led up to that conversation, and despite the fact that we learned last week that the transcript summary leaves out additional incriminating, if not game-changing, details. That the president has expressed interest in doing a “fireside chat” in which he reads the conversation summary as a way to clear his name shows that his central strategy is to tell people not to believe the evidence of their own senses, and to be wowed and won over by his bold assertions of innocence.
At the same time, some Republican senators “are ready to acknowledge that President Trump used U.S. military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his family as the president repeatedly denies a quid pro quo,” but would argue that this is neither illegal nor impeachable, and that the president really was interested in ending actual corruption in Ukraine.
But by the time the House votes to impeach the president and the action moves to the Senate, the GOP will have to settle on one of these approaches. In an impeachment trial, after all, they won’t be making an argument that nothing happened and also that everything actually did happen as described by witnesses but was totally good; this contradictory idea salad might be fine for now in a chaotic media environment, where mutually contradictory notions can live simultaneously, but not in a procedure that focuses the nation’s attention on a narrower clash of narratives. I think it’s far likelier that the GOP will indeed admit the truth of the facts against Trump, but argue that the acts were not impeachable. You will note that I’m leaving out another possibility — that they will attempt to refute the facts the Democrats put forth — because, to put it bluntly, the facts are not on their side. They may attempt to discredit certain points, but to date we have not seen testimony that contradicts the picture of a plot to ratf*ck Joe Biden’s presidential campaign while undermining an ally.
The reason I’m gaming out what seems a likely trajectory of the GOP’s defense at this point is that it’s helping me think more clearly about what sort of impeachment the Democrats should be pursuing. First, the likelihood that Republicans will argue that the president did what he’s accused of, but that it wasn’t really bad, is a powerful argument for broadening the impeachment articles beyond just the (in itself impeachable and far-reaching) Ukraine affair. Trump’s handling of Ukraine shows a pattern of corruption, but if the GOP intends to claim that this corruption isn’t so bad, then that becomes a powerful argument for supersizing the indictment to show that his behavior in this one important area is in fact echoed across his administration. More and varied indictments of wrong-doing can reinforce each other, and undermine arguments that this was one isolated incident that should be forgiven.
Second, the Democrats need to figure out a way to talk about Trump’s actions that goes beyond the solemn, powerful, but deeply abstract notions of abuse of power, corruption, and the like. These are an extremely important, indeed, central part of their case, but the abstraction enables the GOP in turn to counter with more abstractions. The more Democrats allow this battle to be fought literally in Latin (was there a quid pro quo? Well, then, ipso facto and QED!), then it’s likelier that impeachment will be one big veni vidi vici for Donald Trump. But the more they can make their case with vivid and grounded details of what the corruption entails, the stronger it will be.
In relation to Ukraine, it’s accurate and necessary to say that the president abused the power of his office, but both the details and the real-world way this affects ordinary Americans — what this actually looked like — both need to be kept in focus. The secretive diplomatic blackmail effort undertaken by the likes of gonzo Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani, hapless EU Ambasssador Gordon Sondland, and others are damning and easy to describe as the skullduggery it was. As for the impact on Americans — well, the goal was to make sure that the majority of Americans who oppose Trump would be deprived of a free election and the power of the vote in 2020, by allowing the president to kneecap a strong contender for the Democratic nomination. The president wants to make sure he gets re-elected by any means necessary, which means screwing the majority of Americans out of their voting rights. The president was acting like authoritarian garbage, and this should be part of the indictment, but I don’t think Democrats would go wrong in emphasizing the personal assault on millions of Americans: one day, the idea was that we would all see an interview with the Ukrainian president talking about how corrupt Joe Biden and his son are, not realizing that this was something he had been pressured to say in order to stay on the American president’s good side. It would have been Trumpist propaganda, but none of us would have known.
Finally, so long as Ukraine is central to the impeachment, Democrats need to make the plight of Ukraine visceral and urgent for Americans. It is still not sufficiently understood by Americans that Ukraine was invaded by and is currently at war with Russia. Ukrainians continue to die in combat. Support of Ukraine is a commonly held bipartisan position; the president’s willingness to screw Ukraine for personal ends is an impeachable act in and of itself, even separated from the pressure campaign to screw Joe Biden. The fact that Trump’s actions have all been to the benefit of Russia, from undermining President Volodymyr Zelensky by embroiling him in scandal, to withholding weapons from a country that, again, has literally been invaded by Russia, is of a piece with other pro-Russian actions by Trump, and the Democrats are well-served by keeping the larger Putin-Trump entanglement in the mix. Overall, making Ukraine’s struggle and importance to the U.S. as real as possible will serve the impeachment effort. Trump’s corrupt acts were over matters of life and death, and he should never be allowed to weasel out of this basic fact. (A recent letter from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to House members with an impeachment update highlighted Ukraine’s vulnerability, which gives optimism that the Democrats have a good idea of how important this angle is in making the case for impeachment).
The Democrats can’t let an overemphasis on solemnity detract from presenting a narrative of the shocking and scandalous nature of the Ukraine story. In his opening statement to congressional investigators, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Ukraine, William Taylor, described going to the front lines of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and his strong feelings knowing that the weapons the Ukrainians were expecting had been put on hold by the White House for reasons he did not yet fully understand. At the most basic level, this is a riveting tale, and the Democrats should not hold back from highlighting the patriotic efforts of Americans like Taylor who tried to do the right thing in the face of presidential conspiracy. From an ambassador peering into enemy territory, to how close Americans came to being inundated with Trumpist propaganda about Joe Biden had the plot come to fruition, the vivid details of Trump’s corruption will help persuade more and more Americans that the president needs to go.