Speaking to reporters after Donald Trump’s lawyers completed their opening arguments in his impeachment trial on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, could barely conceal a smile. “I hope we have just four Republicans. All we need is four,” he said. At another press conference, Adam Schiff, the leader of the House managers, said it was clear that the President’s lawyers were “still reeling from the revelations of John Bolton’s book.” John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said on Monday that he believed Bolton’s claim, first reported in the Times, that Trump told his former national-security adviser that he wouldn’t release military aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government pursued an investigation of the Bidens. Schiff called this “extraordinary.”
That term also describes the pickle in which Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and the rest of Trump’s Republican enablers now find themselves. “Mortifying” is another word that could be used. Rarely, if ever, has a political blood oath—in this case, a pledge to acquit a crooked President regardless of the evidence against him, and without even bothering to call any witnesses—rebounded so horribly, publicly, and spectacularly. Like Trump, when the whistle-blower’s complaint originally emerged, McConnell and his colleagues have been caught in the act. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.
Schiff’s description was off in one respect. Trump’s lawyers aren’t the only ones who are reeling from the news about Bolton’s book; the entire G.O.P. ecosystem is frazzled. On his show on Monday night, the Fox Business channel’s Lou Dobbs, whose on-air encomiums to Trump have earned him special treatment from the White House, was reduced to putting up a picture of Bolton, a veteran Republican hawk who has served in the Administrations of four G.O.P. Presidents, with the label “A TOOL FOR THE LEFT.” Next, Dobbs will be telling us that John Kelly is a member of the Fourth International and Mitt Romney, who has called on Bolton to testify, is a closet Bernie Sanders supporter.
Even Sean Hannity, the primus inter pares of Trump’s media outriders, seemed a bit discombobulated by the Bolton news. On his radio show on Monday, the best Hannity could manage was to fire at the messenger. “The problem is it’s a Times story,” he told his listeners. “How often did this New York Times get things wrong?” In this case, it seems, the Times got it exactly right. When Bolton, his literary agency, and his publisher released a joint statement on Monday denying that they had anything to do with leaking the contents of the book, they didn’t deny a word of the newspaper’s original report.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Pat Cipollone, the lead member of Trump’s legal team, learned about the Times scoop. Rather than arguing that their client’s misdeeds didn’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses, he and his colleagues have, with straight faces, echoed the President’s claim that he didn’t demand a quid pro quo from Ukraine and, indeed, did nothing wrong at all. They’ve also argued that there is no firsthand evidence to show that he did. On Monday night, in closing the defense’s arguments for the day, Cipollone seemed to hint at a shift in strategy when he said, “This choice belongs to the people. They will make it months from now.”
But it was Trump’s loyalists in the Senate who were left most exposed. (Trump lawyers and Fox News anchors are paid to twist the truth, after all.) The initial reaction, typified by John Cornyn, the second-ranking G.O.P. senator, was to say that there was nothing new in the Bolton story. Late Tuesday afternoon, Senate Republicans emerged from a meeting at which McConnell had reportedly told them that he no longer had enough votes to block witnesses, including Bolton. Once again, they tried to stonewall. “I don’t know what we could learn” from witnesses, Rand Paul said to CNN. “We’ve heard all we could possibly hear.”
To be sure, there isn’t much more to be said about Trump’s perfidy, and, in the grand scheme of things, even the spectacle of Bolton providing a firsthand account of the President’s lying and venality may not do him much further damage. We all recall his quote about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Many of his supporters revel in his status as a Washington pariah. But the former national-security adviser showing up on Capitol Hill and telling his damaging tale (evidently, the Ukraine material isn’t the only revelation in Bolton’s book) would certainly reflect badly on the Republicans who tried to prevent him from appearing. These senators already look like patsies and enablers. If Bolton repeated what is reportedly in the book for all the world to see and hear, it would make them look like blithering idiots as well. Who else would have agreed to countenance Trump’s preposterous defense—that his real concern was corruption inside Ukraine?
Regardless of what happens next, the Republicans are still likely to acquit the President—there has never been much doubt about that. But if McConnell somehow succeeds in preventing Bolton from testifying after all this, there can no longer be even any pretense that the trial is on the level, or that an acquittal along party lines is anything other than an abject display of political cowardice and self-abasement by the current generation of Republican senators. For the timely clarification, we are in debt to whoever told the Times about what’s in Bolton’s book.
