President Trump began Wednesday in a dark place. “There has been no President in the history of our Country who has been treated so badly as I have,” he lamented on Twitter, before 8 A.M. The night before, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party had made a momentous political shift and launched a full-scale impeachment investigation of the President. The move was triggered by a new scandal, the details of which have emerged in recent days: Trump, having escaped impeachment over the Mueller investigation, turns out to have asked Ukraine’s new President to investigate the former Vice-President Joe Biden, at the same time that he was holding up more than three hundred million dollars in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The disclosure had proven to be too much, even for the cautious Pelosi. Now Trump faces the very real possibility that he will become only the fourth President in U.S. history to confront a House majority ready to impeach him.
Trump, however, had one play left. On Wednesday morning, he released the full White House account of his July 25th phone call with the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump, his allies, and his advisers promised that it would be less than meets the eye. Releasing the call summary, they insisted, would undercut the impeachment inquiry into the Ukraine matter before it even started. On Fox, the reporter Ed Henry quoted a Trump source who warned Democrats: “There’s no ‘there’ there.” The new editor of the conservative Washington Free Beacon tweeted, “Told reliably by source who has seen a transcript of the call that it isn’t likely to live up to the high expectations many have.” Trump himself got into the pre-spin game. “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President?” he tweeted at 9:17 A.M. Wednesday. “They should, a perfect call — got them by surprise!”
Then, at precisely 10 A.M., the White House released its version of the call, which was based on notes taken at the time. It did not say what President Trump and his advisers had suggested it would say. Not at all. Usually in American politics, the goal in the expectations game is to tamp them down; in this case, Trump had succeeded at the opposite, promoting the notion that his phone call with Zelensky would be proven innocuous, with nary a whiff of impropriety. Instead, the document released by his own staff added new information to the scandal, revealing that Trump had not only requested an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter but had specifically asked Zelensky to coöperate with his private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and the Attorney General, William Barr, on it. The President’s language was hardly subtle. Trump mentioned the Attorney General four separate times. “The United States has been very good to Ukraine,” Trump said early in the call, before quickly adding, “I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily.” After Zelensky responded by requesting approval to buy more U.S. anti-tank Javelin missiles, to aid his fight against Russia, Trump replied by explaining the reciprocity he really wanted: investigations of the Bidens and also of Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. elections.
“I would like you to do us a favor though,” the President said, in a line that seems destined to land in the history books. “Whatever you can do,” Trump added later in the conversation, “it’s very important that you do it.” This was not the exculpatory moment that Trump had claimed it would be. Impeachment may have been an uncertain outcome before 10 A.M. on Wednesday. Afterward, it was a near-certainty.
The most interesting moments to be in Washington are when the conventional wisdom is shifting and not everyone knows it yet, or when an old certainty has been shredded and nothing has emerged to replace it. As of Monday morning, the political world was pretty sure that Donald Trump would not be impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives, and that he would enter the 2020 campaign and race to win reëlection, before the economy betrayed him with a recession that forecasters increasingly see as inevitable. Instead, over a remarkable day and a half, a new reality emerged: Donald Trump appears to have got himself impeached. Trump now seems all but certain not only to face an impeachment investigation but an actual impeachment vote in the House. And, whenever it happens, and whatever the specifics of the indictment turn out to be, the impeachment vote will have been triggered by a new scandal very much of his own making.
Nine o’clock on Monday night is more or less when the conventional wisdom collapsed. It was then that the Washington Post published a remarkable op-ed by seven key freshmen House Democrats from swing districts. They are known collectively on Capitol Hill as “majority makers” and “front-liners.” (In the case of the group’s five women, they have taken to calling themselves “the bad-ass caucus,” as CNN’s Dana Bash pointed out.) All seven served in national-security positions and previously had been reluctant to endorse impeachment proceedings. Now, they had decided to hold hands and jump, together. “These allegations are a threat to all we have sworn to protect,” they wrote, calling Trump’s actions, if true, both illegal and grounds for impeachment. “This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand,” they wrote. Soon after, one by one, more House Democrats who had previously been refusing to support impeachment came out in favor of it. By 11 P.M., even close allies of Pelosi, such as Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Debbie Dingell, had switched sides. It was a Washington stampede.
Of course, Monday night may not have been the actual moment when the politics changed. You could date it backward a few days, to the previous Tuesday, when Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that a whistle-blower inside the U.S. intelligence community, who had information about serious wrongdoing, had come forward but that his complaint was not being shared with Congress, despite a law requiring its disclosure. In the following days it emerged that the subject of the complaint was Trump himself and that it involved Ukraine. By the weekend, Trump acknowledged that he spoke directly with Zelensky about investigating Biden, and news organizations were reporting that the President had personally held up the more than three hundred million dollars in aid to Ukraine eight days before their call. By Sunday, Schiff was on television suggesting that Democrats might now be finally ready to “cross the Rubicon” of impeachment.
Schiff, a close Pelosi ally, was signalling the political shift to come. On Monday afternoon, Pelosi had quietly given permission to her troops to bolt on impeachment, including to the op-ed signatories, whom she privately met with (as one of them, Representative Elissa Slotkin, later confirmed publicly). Remarkably, Democrats appeared to be making the decision to move on impeachment not because they believed it would benefit the Party politically. By Monday, polls still showed that a majority of Americans were firmly against it. Slotkin, who was elected in 2016 in a traditionally Republican district in Michigan, risks losing her seat. She and other Democrats seem to be proceeding despite the politics, not because of them.
By Tuesday morning, there was a new conventional wisdom settling in, but Trump, up at the United Nations, in New York, for the annual General Assembly, did not seem to have received the message. At fifteen after ten that morning, he delivered a combative address to the assembled “globalists” about the failures of their internationalism and the benefits of his own, Trump-style nationalism. At one point, he lectured them about “wise leaders” who put the interests of their nations first, proving if nothing else that Trump is immune to irony.
In Washington, more Democrats called for impeachment. At noon, Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights hero, came to the House floor. “I truly believe the time to begin impeachment proceedings against this President has come. To delay or to do otherwise would betray the foundation of our democracy,” he said. He and other close allies of Pelosi in the Congressional Black Caucus had for months deferred to her on impeachment. His words now showed where the Speaker intended to end the day.
At this point, the fight was not over whether Democrats would proceed but how they would do so. On Capitol Hill, those are the details that matter; process often dictates outcome, and no one was sure what exactly the process would be. Would this new inquiry cover the Mueller report, with its description of ten incidents of alleged obstruction of justice by the President? Or stick closely to the new Ukraine allegations? For months, there had been talk of creating a select committee to investigate Trump, with Schiff at its head. Advocates of the idea saw it as a way to reduce the cacophony and ineffectiveness of ongoing investigations by six different committees (and their attention-seeking chairmen), which had hampered House efforts. On Tuesday afternoon, an unusual alliance of Never Trump Republicans, such as Bill Kristol, and the influential freshman progressive leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged to publicly fight the plan for a select committee, with Ocasio-Cortez warning that a new panel would lead to endless delay. “We don’t have the luxury of time w/another committee,” she tweeted. The House Judiciary Committee is already investigating, and “impeachment belongs there,” she added.
By midafternoon on Tuesday, everyone—Trump and also his Democratic critics—understood that this was an inflection point. At 2:12 P.M., while still at the U.N., Trump announced, via tweet, the Wednesday release of the “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of his call with Zelensky. At 2:29 p.m. came a rejoinder from Schiff, who said that the House Intelligence panel hoped to have the whistle-blower testify “as soon as this week.” And then aides to Pelosi confirmed to reporters that she would move ahead with a formal impeachment inquiry. At four o’clock, House Democrats met in caucus to hear Pelosi explain the path forward. At 4:30 P.M., the Senate acted, too, taking the unusually bipartisan step of voting unanimously to require the intelligence community to turn over the whistle-blower’s complaint. In the closed-door House-caucus meeting, meanwhile, some Democratic members appeared to feed direct, verbatim quotes to congressional reporters, who soon disclosed that Pelosi would not go for the select-committee option but would leave jurisdiction over impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee, with other panels charged with sending Judiciary their findings. “Here we are,” Pelosi reportedly said. “A moment of truth.”
At 5 P.M., Pelosi walked out to the Speaker’s Balcony and informed the press and public of what they already knew: impeachment was official, though she gave almost no other details. “The President must be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.” The President, meanwhile, had a different approach to a day whose developments portended troubled times ahead for an already troubled democracy. At the U.N., Trump abruptly ordered his motorcade back to Trump Tower for some executive TV time. Trump’s response to the Speaker came soon afterward, in a quick blast of tweets attacking what he called the “breaking news Witch Hunt garbage” once again overshadowing everything else in his Presidency. “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he lamented. And, also: “Can you believe this?”
The significance, and political risk, for congressional Democrats is real. In March of this year, Pelosi was pushed on the subject of impeachment shortly before the Mueller report was submitted to the Attorney General. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it,” Pelosi said.
The Nancy Pelosi of March did not find her criteria met in September. There was no bipartisan consensus about Trump’s latest outrage, no matter how compelling or overwhelming it seemed. Pelosi’s caucus stampeded this week, and she chose to join them. As Wednesday began, Trump suggested that she and her fellow-Democrats had made a terrible mistake, and would soon be forced to regret it when he released the summary of the call. Could he disprove the allegation, or at least hold the line? Would he instill enough doubt about what had happened to cause Democrats to question their embrace of impeachment, or at least to keep Republicans in line behind him?
Within less than an hour of the White House’s release on Wednesday morning, the answer to those questions were clear. Democrats were full steam ahead, and more united than they had been the day before. “Far worse than I imagined,” Representative Brendan Boyle said. “Smoking gun,” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted. Schiff said that it showed Trump to be a mobster. Journalists called it damning, revelatory, and an embarrassment. “In normal times,” Noah Shachtman, the editor of the Daily Beast, tweeted, “a kill shot for a Presidency.” By late Wednesday afternoon, NBC reported that its impeachment tally among representatives had grown, from only around a hundred supporters last week to two hundred and seventeen. By Wednesday evening, the count had grown by one more, to two hundred and eighteen: a majority of the House.
Republicans were slower to react. Mitt Romney, just about the only Senate Republican who is still sometimes publically critical of Trump, told reporters that the account of Trump’s call was “extremely troubling.” But Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who called Trump a “kook” in 2016 and is now one of his most prominent public supporters, said Democrats would be “insane” to proceed with impeachment on the basis of the call. Graham, who was one of the impeachment managers in the Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton, added that Democrats had “lost their minds when it comes to [the] President.” Other Republican senators were not so voluble in Trump’s support, but, like Graham, they appeared to be sticking with him. “I’ve looked at the transcript,” Senator Joni Ernst, of Iowa, said. “I don’t see anything there.”
The duelling realities seemed to reflect the new political normal in Washington, where the conventional wisdom around impeachment has now been upended but the extraordinary partisan divide remains as wide as ever. The Clinton impeachment fight gave us a President’s memorable hairsplitting over what the meaning of “is” is. The Trump impeachment fight is already giving us its own disputes over the very nature of language and power, intent and action. With Trump, impeachment will end up being about more fundamental questions of executive authority in a democracy: Was there a quid pro quo or not in the call? What is extortion? Abuse of power?
We can now look forward to endless, circular, partisan, and highly unsatisfying debates on those questions, in the coming weeks and months. There will be much more shouting. There will be more facts to emerge, subsidiary plotlines to follow, spinoff scandals, new characters. The whistle-blower’s complaint has already made its way to Capitol Hill, where leaders and members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have been reading it—and giving all the signs that it contains alarming new revelations. Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell said it was a “five-alarm concern for me.” Even a Republican senator, Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, suggested that the information contained in the complaint was significant and “very troubling.” Clearly, there will be more revelations, and soon. But we have already learned a lot this week. This is the forty-eight hours that finally answered one of the enduring mysteries of the Trump Presidency: yes, we can now say, a Democratic House of Representatives will move forward with impeaching this most unusual of Presidents. We don’t know who it will benefit politically, or where the investigation will end up. We don’t know which scandals will make the final cut in the articles of impeachment and which will be left out. But it is happening. The next season of the Trump show has begun.
