Sue Glassner at the New Yorker recaps the week and the timeline on how quickly Donald Trump went from "getting away with it once again" to "dead in the water", and the tipping point was Wednesday.
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 proved 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 proved 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 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.
Trump blew it.
If he had shut up, if he had not released the transcript, he would have gotten away with it. Everyone would be screaming at how Pelosi had messed up. By the time Adam Schiff had gotten to the bottom of the mess, it would have been too late, the media would have moved on from "Pelosi's failed impeachment attempt" to something else.
But then Trump impeached himself.
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