As Congress returned in January 2019, Mitch McConnell faced a transformed political landscape. With the arrival of a Democratic majority in the House, President Donald Trump faced for the first time the imminent prospect of serious congressional oversight backed up by the subpoena power wielded by House committees. The chances that Trump would be impeached had gone from zero when the Republicans ran the House to eminently possible, if not probable, with the Democrats in charge.
Trump’s political and personal fate depended on the interaction of the leaders of the Democratic House and the Republican Senate: Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. They were, and remain, the yin and yang of American politics—fiercely competitive, strong-willed politicians, superb strategists and tacticians, committed party builders, and tireless fundraisers. They had been facing off as leaders for a historically long time, beginning after the 2006 midterm elections.
Pelosi had had four years in the majority, followed by eight in the minority; McConnell’s arc was precisely the reverse. During their first Congress as leaders, Pelosi and McConnell had made a promising start, working together after the Lehman crash to pass the consequential and controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October 2008. But since then, they had crossed swords many times, particularly in the fierce battles over the Affordable Care Act. It would be difficult to find a single issue they agreed on; they personified the divide between Democrats and Republicans. There might have been mutual respect between two old pros, but McConnell was increasingly disinclined to respect anyone; in his 2016 memoir, he mocked Pelosi for reciting her talking points endlessly, with the message always being “Don’t forget the children.”1 As he often did, McConnell showed real insight. Pelosi, with five children and nine grandchildren, approached politics guided by a burning concern for children and their futures, which played no part in the calculus of McConnell or Trump.
Pelosi, the first woman to serve as speaker, had her own issues with her caucus. She and her principal deputies, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn, were all seventy-five or older, and many House Democrats, including some incoming members, thought it was time for a generational change. Two weeks after the 2018 midterm elections, sixteen newly elected House members announced their opposition to Pelosi as leader. “We are thankful to leader Pelosi for her years of service to our country and our caucus,” their letter stated. Now, it went on, “the time has come for new leadership.”
Pelosi wasted no time beating back the rebellion. With her characteristic thoroughness and forcefulness, she persuaded potentially strong opponents not to run and easily defeated those who did.2 Eager to legislate after eight years out of power, Pelosi cranked up the machinery and started advancing legislation across the full spectrum of Democratic priorities.
McConnell’s agenda was clear enough. With the House in Democratic hands, few (if any) Trump legislative initiatives were likely to succeed, but, in fact, there were few (if any) Trump legislative initiatives at all. Trump had promised a trillion-dollar infrastructure package, which could have had bipartisan appeal, but it never seemed to materialize. Hard-fought compromises about NAFTA 2.0 and treatment of the Dreamers (undocumented immigrants who had arrived as children) might be possible, but certainly not in the early months of the year. McConnell’s principal role would be to kill every piece of legislation that the House sent over. Speaking in Kentucky in April, he promised to be the “grim reaper” for all progressive policies, such as the “Green New Deal.”3
Since his Senate would have no legislative agenda, McConnell focused the chamber on his highest priority, and the one issue the Senate could handle without Pelosi’s cooperation: confirming federal judges. Of course, this had been his priority since day one of the Trump administration, but now there was nothing to compete for Senate floor time. For the first two years, McConnell had given priority to confirming Trump’s nominees for the courts of appeals. Now he turned his attention to confirming a flood of federal district judges. In 2017, the Senate confirmed only six district court judges. In 2018, the pace picked up as the Senate confirmed forty-eight. The year 2019 would see eighty nominees for federal district judgeships confirmed.4
At the same time, the central drama of the Trump years was coming to a head; Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team were bringing their work to its conclusion. Under the existing regulations for a special counsel, Mueller would submit his report to the attorney general, William Barr, who would be confirmed as Jeff Sessions’s replacement on February 12. Barr was inheriting a department demoralized by Trump’s interference in the law enforcement process and would face the challenge of rebuilding confidence that the Justice Department was not simply a political arm of the White House. Many prominent lawyers who had worked with Barr thought he was well suited to right the ship. But others shared the concern that Barr had virtually applied for the job by submitting his nineteen-page memo expressing a remarkably broad view of presidential power, which undoubtedly appealed to Trump.5
In the Senate, Lindsey Graham had become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, succeeding Chuck Grassley, and he would have the responsibility for confirming Barr, working with him, and overseeing the Justice Department. Graham was a chameleon, having gone from being a member of the House team of managers who zealously prosecuted Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial to an independent maverick who was John McCain’s best friend and wingman and scathing Trump critic, to being Trump’s strongest defender and golfing buddy. Barack Obama, in his memoir, would describe Graham as completely untrustworthy. “You know how in the spy thriller or the heist movie, you’re introduced to the crew at the beginning?” Obama told Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff. “Lindsey’s the guy who double-crosses everyone to save his own skin.”6
Political observers puzzled over what had happened to Graham. Some speculated that Graham, who grew up poor and lost his parents early, needed an older brother or father figure to look up to.7 Others felt that the best part of Graham had died with John McCain. But the answer was less complicated. Graham, by his own admission, liked to be “relevant.”8 He took delight in being Trump’s new best friend, believing, with some justification, that he could have special impact by talking privately to the president. Moreover, Graham was up for reelection in 2020, and he would likely face a strong, well-financed challenge. Nor had it escaped his notice that Trump was much more popular in South Carolina than he was. Graham needed to anticipate defeating any Republican primary challenger who came after him for being too independent, and Trump could be brutal to any Republican who crossed him. Graham had every incentive to stay close to Trump; he thrust himself into the center of many key debates, having discovered long before that reporters love to quote senators. In the turbulent months ahead, it would often seem as if there were only two Senate Republicans: McConnell, who was the leader, and Graham, who never stopped talking.
The first order of business was to reopen the government. Trump’s temper tantrum in December had resulted in the longest shutdown of the federal government in history, even though the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. With Pelosi now in command in the House, Trump’s leverage was dramatically reduced. When McConnell, who had opposed the shutdown, called the White House, Trump proved eager to find a way to end the impasse. On January 25, Trump simply capitulated, agreeing to a compromise to reopen the government until February 15, which included no money for the border wall. It was essentially the same approach he had rejected in December, which enraged some of his hard-line supporters but was welcomed by many Republican senators. “None of us are willing to go through this again,” said Lisa Murkowski. “We’ve already lost,” said Georgia’s Johnny Isakson. “It’s a matter of the extent that we want to keep losing.” Shelley Moore Capito, coming from West Virginia, one of the nation’s strongest pro-Trump states, observed, “There are a lot of strategies we could employ that would work better” than a shutdown.9
Attention now turned to the Mueller investigation, which after more than a year and a half was drawing to an end. On March 12, Mueller sent his 448-page report to the attorney general, as required by law. A week earlier, Mueller had briefed Barr on the contents of the report and the approach he had taken to the key issues. Recognizing that the report was dense reading, Mueller and his team had prepared comprehensive summaries of its two major subjects: possible Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice committed by President Trump. Mueller assumed that Barr would release the summaries to the public. Instead, Barr issued a four-page letter in which he offered his own “summary” of the report, though it was in fact a misleading characterization of the Mueller team’s work.
Part I of the Mueller report documented extensive evidence of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Although the report stated that it had not found evidence of criminal conspiracy involving Trump campaign officials, it documented numerous examples of Russia’s outreach to the Trump presidential campaign and the clear willingness of the Trump campaign to accept Russian assistance. Part II documented ten instances in which Trump had taken actions that seemed intended to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference in the election. Mueller did not reach a conclusion about whether the president had committed an indictable offense; rather, he laid out the evidence for Congress and the public to assess.
Barr’s letter emphasized that Mueller had found no criminal conspiracy—which would have required “probable cause”—between Trump campaign officials and Russia, without acknowledging the mass of evidence showing coordination of efforts. Barr was even more disingenuous in dealing with the issue of obstruction of justice. He knew that Mueller was working under the constraint of legal guidance from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that a president cannot be indicted while in office. Mueller told Barr that he would not make a finding suggesting that Trump had obstructed justice because the president would have no chance to respond to it in court. But the report spelled out ten specific acts by the president that sounded very much like obstruction of justice. Despite knowing Mueller’s rationale, Barr stated that Mueller had not been able to reach a conclusion, leaving it up to the attorney general to do so—which he did, exonerating Trump.
“It was obvious that Barr had spun our findings for political gain at best, and lied for the president at worst. . . . It contained so many deceptions, it was hard to take them all in,” said Andrew Weissmann, a respected senior member of Mueller’s team. “Some were delicately worded obfuscations. Some were unbridled lies.”10 Mueller had explained to Barr his complete thinking on the issues of collusion and obstruction, but Barr had betrayed his confidence by deliberately distorting what the report said. Playing by what he thought were the rules, Mueller called Barr’s office the next day. Receiving no response, Mueller then wrote to Barr on March 27, showing his unmistakable anger. “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work or conclusion,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure public confidence in the outcome of the investigation.”11
But public confidence in the outcome of the investigation was not Barr’s goal. Having undercut Mueller’s findings, Barr was now in no rush to release the full report. “A critical three weeks passed between when you delivered the letter with the focus on the principal conclusions and when we ultimately got the redacted report,” Senator Chris Coons said when Barr testified before the Judiciary Committee. “My concern is that gave President Trump and his folks more than three weeks of an open field to say ‘I was completely exonerated.’”12 The impact of Barr’s letter became clear immediately. The New York Times called it “a significant political victory for Mr. Trump [that] lifted a cloud that has hung over his presidency since before he took the oath of office.”13
On April 18, the day before he finally released Mueller’s report, Barr held a press conference and once again mischaracterized the report, piling on one misstatement after another, including the remarkable assertion that Trump had fully cooperated with Mueller’s investigation, even though the president had refused to be interviewed, his son Donald Jr. had refused to be interviewed, and Trump had encouraged many witnesses not to cooperate.14
Mark Twain famously observed that “a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” On April 18, speaking in Louisville hours after Barr’s statement, McConnell said that the Mueller report should make President Trump “feel good,” while acknowledging that he had not yet read it. McConnell noted that Barr had “an outstanding reputation in Washington circles. . . . There is no chance that at his age and his status within the profession that he’s going to go in there and be some sort of political hack for this administration. . . . I trust Bill Barr.”15
McConnell’s water-carrying for Barr and Trump intensified in the weeks that followed. “The special counsel’s finding is clear: case closed,” McConnell said mockingly on May 7. “This ought to be good news for everyone but my Democratic colleagues seem to be publicly working through the five stages of grief.”16
“With an exhaustive investigation complete, would the country finally unify to confront the real challenges before us?” McConnell queried, “Or would we remain consumed by unhinged partisanship, and keep dividing ourselves to the point that Putin and his agents need only stand on the sidelines and watch as their job is done for them?”
“Regrettably,” he continued, “the answer is obvious.”
Chuck Schumer responded to McConnell, saying, “It’s not done,” and he accused the majority leader of “whitewashing” Trump’s conduct and attempting to protect him from accountability. “The leader says: ‘Let’s move on.’ It’s sort of like Richard Nixon saying let’s move on at the height of the investigation of his wrongdoing,” Schumer said.17
After initially indicating an intention to invite Barr and Mueller to testify before the Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham pivoted to join the “case closed” contingent. “He’s done his job, and I’m not going to retry the case,” Graham said in an interview. “I’m all good. I’m done with the Mueller report.” When questioned about Mueller’s finding that Trump had tried to order White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller while the probe was under way, Graham added, “I don’t care what he said to Don McGahn—it’s what he did. The President never obstructed.”18
Not only was he done with Mueller, but Graham also stated his readiness to go on the offensive. Republicans were interested in getting a better handle on what he called “the other side of the story”: investigating the 2016 campaign and whether the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign engaged in efforts to hurt Trump.
Even those Republican senators facing difficult reelection bids who might have benefited from distancing themselves from Trump refused to do so. Cory Gardner of Colorado, widely seen as the most endangered Republican Senate candidate, said, “It’s time for Congress to move forward and get to work on behalf of the American people.” Gardner said he would seek punishment for Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election but stopped short of any criticism of Trump. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said that “pursuing the path of endless investigations and impeachment would be a bitterly partisan move that would further divide the country.” But two independent-minded Republicans did express criticism of Trump. Mitt Romney, recently elected to the Senate from Utah, said that he was “sickened” by the report’s description of Trump’s behavior, and Susan Collins called the portrayal of Trump “unflattering.” But Romney indicated that the lack of charges on obstruction of justice resolved the matter for him. “The business of government can move on,” he said.19
The full story would emerge and become the subject of fierce debate, but for the moment, the congressional Democrats who had been waiting for Mueller’s report faced the challenge of how to deal with Trump’s assault on the rule of law and his continued inexplicable attachment to Vladimir Putin. The House Democrats were fully committed to oversight hearings that would shed light on the corruption and abuse of power by Trump, his family, and his administration. They faced the overriding issue of whether Trump’s conduct warranted an impeachment inquiry.
While many of the House Democrats had vehement and clashing views, ultimately, only one Democrat was “the decider.” Nancy Pelosi took a back seat to no one in her contempt for Trump, her belief that he was abusing his power and violating his oath of office, and her fear of the damage he could do to the country. She questioned his fitness for the presidency, describing him as unethical, anti-intellectual, incurious, dishonorable, and uninformed. “This is a strain of cat that I don’t have the medical credentials to analyze nor the religious credentials to judge,” Pelosi said. She called him “the most dangerous person in the history of the country.”20
At the same time, the speaker was an extraordinarily savvy, practical politician with a keen sense of the national climate and what her caucus would support. Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report had deprived it of the impact that it might otherwise have had. The ball was now in Pelosi’s court, without the strong validation of an impeachable offense by the special counsel. Polls showed support for impeachment weakening,21 and Pelosi was well aware that her majority resulted from moderate Democrats having won narrow victories in closely balanced districts that could easily swing the other way in 2020. Pelosi’s moderates wanted Congress to focus on practical matters—ensuring access to health care, reducing college costs, and creating jobs—not impeachment. They were not ready to support it, and therefore neither was she.
Pelosi’s reluctance to impeach Trump went beyond her political calculus. After first becoming speaker in 2007, she had faced pressure from Democrats to impeach George W. Bush over the increasingly disastrous war in Iraq. Pelosi was fiercely opposed to the war; she thought the invasion of Iraq was “the biggest mistake our country has ever made.” But she did not believe that a president should be impeached based on policy differences, and she worried about the implications of impeaching Bush after Clinton had been impeached.22 Now, twelve years later, considering Trump, she remained cautious.
“I’m not for impeachment,” she told the Washington Post in mid-March. “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country,” Pelosi said. “And he’s just not worth it,” she concluded.23
It was a memorable one-liner, but Pelosi’s position would become increasingly unconvincing. Notwithstanding Barr’s distortions, the case for impeaching Trump clearly met her standard of being “so compelling” and “overwhelming.” In June, more than a thousand former prosecutors, Democrats and Republicans, joined an open letter declaring that Trump would have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction of justice if he were not the sitting president.24 By insisting that impeachment could proceed only with bipartisan support, Pelosi was giving Trump impunity by granting McConnell and the Senate Republicans absolute veto power on whether the House should move forward. Her moderates were afraid of impeaching Trump, but that should not have been decisive if the country was facing a dangerous president running roughshod over the Constitution. Throughout the Trump years, Democrats and liberal pundits would constantly criticize the Senate Republicans for lack of political courage in failing to put the national interest over their political fortunes. But the House moderates would be showing the exact same lack of courage if they prevented impeachment from being pursued. At some point, they would need to step up.
Mueller, who had been virtually invisible since his appointment, finally appeared in public, testifying in the House on July 27, more than four months after having submitted his report. The partisan divide was deeper than ever, with the Democrats split over how to proceed and the Republicans united behind the false narrative that Trump had been exonerated.
Mueller had one chance to cut through the partisan warfare and stand up for his report, whose impact had been blunted by Barr’s mischaracterization of it and by the delay in its release. He testified for seven hours, appearing first before the House Judiciary Committee and then before the House Intelligence Committee. He was plainly a reluctant witness, who steadfastly avoided making statements that went beyond the text of the report. Mueller declined to answer nearly two hundred questions put to him and offered the most cryptic answers possible to many others. He created confusion on his views about the rationale for his decision not to say that Trump had obstructed justice. He also refused to be critical of Barr’s handling of the report. Even so, the Democrats’ persistent questioning did get him to confirm the most damaging elements of his findings: that Trump had not been cleared of obstructing justice and that the president had been untruthful in some of his responses to the probe.25
But overall Mueller did not convey the urgency about a corrupt president abusing his power and jeopardizing our democracy in a way that would have influenced an open-minded viewer. He chose to appear alone, when it would have been perfectly reasonable for him to be flanked by his principal deputies, to whom he could have deferred on particular questions. And he was not an impressive witness; he looked old, hesitant, and frequently befuddled.26
Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was able to get Mueller to acknowledge that accepting foreign assistance to influence the outcome of a presidential election was unethical—possibly a crime, Mueller noted—and certainly unpatriotic. When the hearing ended, Schiff observed that the special counsel had submitted his report; now, it was up to the House to determine how to respond.27 Schiff was one of Pelosi’s most trusted lieutenants, and the ball was plainly in the speaker’s court.
Although Mueller’s testimony inflicted no perceptible damage on Trump, this last week of July would prove to be fateful for the Trump presidency. Dan Coats, the respected director of national intelligence, resigned, removing one of the few experienced foreign policy advisers willing to give Trump unwelcome news.28 And on July 25, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the first volume of what would be a five-volume report on Russian “active measures” that had interfered with the 2016 presidential election, a comprehensive, bipartisan undertaking steered by the committee’s Republican chairman, Richard Burr, and its Democratic vice chairman, Mark Warner. Burr and Warner came to their assignment with a real personal friendship, which helped keep the committee’s work on track.29 Their friendship did much to restore the Intelligence Committee’s tradition of bipartisanship, which had been rocked by fierce divisions over the committee’s five-year investigation into the CIA’s detention and enhanced interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib during the Bush administration.30 Now, the sobering nature of what the committee members were learning about Russian “active measures” and the evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign kept them committed to their task.
But the Intelligence Committee report would take a back seat to another development that same day. On July 25, President Trump placed a call to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, asking him to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president Joe Biden, and his ties to the Burisma Company, on whose board he served, if Ukraine wanted to receive $400 million in military assistance that had already been appropriated by Congress. Apparently, Zelensky was not sufficiently responsive. That same day, the Office of Management and Budget formally withheld military aid to Ukraine.31
Throughout the Trump presidency, observers would wonder what lessons the president was taking away from his experiences. In private life, Trump had successfully brazened, bullied, lied, and litigated through every situation, repeatedly avoiding disaster and coming out ahead. Now he was the president, wielding great power that he saw as virtually unconstrained. Plainly, Trump’s experience with Mueller did not chasten him; his takeaway was that nothing could stop him. The call to Zelensky was blatant, rather than private; at least seven other administration officials were on the call. One who heard the call was sufficiently disturbed that he or she filed a whistleblower complaint on August 12.
Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to combat a military invasion by Russia, which had already seized Crimea and the eastern part of Ukraine. On September 3, a bipartisan group of senators, including Jeanne Shaheen, Rob Portman, Dick Durbin, Ron Johnson, and Richard Blumenthal, all of whom had championed the aid for Ukraine, demanded to know why it was being held up.32 On September 20, the Wall Street Journal ran a bombshell story reporting that in a July phone call, Trump had repeatedly pressured the Ukraine president to investigate Hunter Biden’s tie to Burisma, urging Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Attorney General Barr to probe whether former vice president Biden had acted improperly. Trump defended his call with Zelensky as “totally appropriate”; he would later characterize the call as “perfect.”33
Unlike the complex interaction between the Trump campaign and Russia, which came to light over a two-and-a-half-year period and multiple investigations, Trump’s pressure on Zelensky exploded into public view virtually overnight. On September 24, the White House, responding to the press and congressional pressure, released a transcript of the phone call, which clearly showed Trump’s call to be a shakedown of the Ukrainian president, who was in desperate need of military support.34
That morning, Nancy Pelosi initiated impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Her resistance had ended when she realized that Trump was incorrigible and that he would defy Congress’s appropriation of military aid and jeopardize the security of an American ally, advancing Russia’s interests in order to serve his own personal political ends. Indeed, Pelosi quickly saw that her argument against impeachment—let the voters give their verdict on Trump at the next election—made no sense if Trump was abusing his office to ensure his reelection by damaging his most formidable likely opponent.
Within twenty-four hours, 57 House Democrats endorsed impeachment, a number that quickly rose to 196. Pelosi was undoubtedly moved by a powerful op-ed piece in the Washington Post by seven freshman Democrats with experience in the military and the defense and intelligence agencies—precisely the moderates that she wanted to protect—endorsing the impeachment inquiry. “This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand,” the op-ed stated. “To uphold and defend our Constitution, Congress must determine whether the president was indeed willing to use his power and withhold security assistance funds to persuade a foreign country to assist him in an upcoming election. If these allegations are true, we believe these actions constitute an impeachable offense.”35
By this point, though, Pelosi harbored no realistic hope that impeachment could be bipartisan. Trump tweeted angrily, “Presidential harassment.” McConnell had previously said that he was “never given an explanation” for why Ukraine aid was held up, even though he had pressed for one.36 Now, however, the majority leader moved quickly to get his talking points out. “Speaker Pelosi’s much-publicized efforts to restrain her far-left conference have finally crumbled. House Democrats cannot help themselves,” McConnell said. “Instead of working together across party lines on legislation to help American families and strengthen our nation, they will descend even deeper into their obsession with relitigating 2016.”37
Lindsey Graham, who not long ago had demonstrated a deep commitment to Ukraine and strong support for military aid to allow Ukraine to resist Russian aggression, now lined up to defend the president’s behavior. Just weeks before, Graham had joined Dick Durbin in threatening to withhold $5 billion from the Pentagon unless the aid to Ukraine was restored, but none of that history mattered now. Pelosi’s decision launched Graham into a rant. “Impeachment over this? What a nothing (non-quid pro quo) burger? Democrats have lost their mind when it comes to President Trump,” Graham vented. “If you are underwhelmed by this transcript, you are not alone or ‘crazy.’ Those willing to impeach the president over this transcript have shown their hatred for President Trump. . . . In the phone call everybody is talking about, there is not one scintilla of evidence that the President threatened Ukraine with withholding money because they wanted him to do Trump’s political bidding. That did not happen.”38
Graham’s passion notwithstanding, the facts of what Trump had done were clear. The audiotape of Trump’s call with Zelensky was truly the proverbial smoking gun. The pressure Trump had put on Zelensky was enormous. He was holding something of great value to Ukraine: desperately needed military aid. He was defying the will of Congress, which had appropriated the funds. His desire to have Zelensky do political harm to Biden was undeniable. “I need a favor,” Trump said, making it crystal clear that he was seeking a quid pro quo.
McConnell was certainly right in saying that many Democrats had wanted to impeach Trump for a long time. But they had not done so, and after Mueller’s report and congressional appearance fizzled, Pelosi and most other Democrats had given up on impeachment, turning their attention and energy to legislation and to the fierce election coming up in 2020. They reversed course only because of Trump’s shocking act. Moreover, the whistleblower complaint that made Trump’s phone call public was an act of conscience by a career foreign service officer. The witnesses who gave testimony that built the case for impeachment were not political people. They were almost all career foreign service officers, who had been in government for fifteen to thirty years, serving Republican and Democratic administrations. They knew what normal government policy looked like and the way normal presidents behaved. All of them believed that Trump’s behavior was shockingly aberrational and an abuse of his office. They came forward and risked their careers, out of a sense of commitment to the Constitution.
Evidently, nothing that Trump could do would diminish McConnell and Graham’s reflexive, unyielding support. However, several Senate Republicans responded more soberly, expressing concern about Trump’s conduct. “It remains troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling,” Mitt Romney said after reading the transcript. “Republicans ought not to be rushing to circle the wagons and say there’s no ‘there’ there when there’s obviously a lot that is very troubling there,” observed Nebraska’s Ben Sasse. Still, most of the Senate Republicans, however uneasy, downplayed the seriousness of what Trump had done, even as they questioned the wisdom of releasing the transcript.39
In the intense few weeks that followed, various Republicans would try out several mitigating defenses: Trump had momentarily over-stepped and made a “bad call”; the military aid had been held up for a variety of reasons not related to investigating the Bidens; the aid was ultimately disbursed, so no real harm had resulted. But as the House inquiry and the press coverage continued, none of these defenses held water. The effort to smear Joe Biden and his son had started months before; Rudy Giuliani had publicly announced in May that he was traveling to Kiev to urge the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma and the origins of interference in the 2016 presidential election.40 Trump’s phone call was not a one-off error; it was part of a concerted effort by the administration to block the military aid to Ukraine, despite congressional pressure to provide the aid that had been appropriated. The administration released the funds only after the scheme to block it became public.
The House investigation moved forward rapidly, and subpoenas were issued to Giuliani, Secretary of State Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Acting Budget Director Russell Vought.41 But White House counsel Pat Cipollone (who had succeeded Don McGahn) responded that the administration would not comply with the subpoenas.42
Throughout November, the House investigation moved forward. Senior foreign service officers were deposed behind closed doors before testifying in public. William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, a thirty-year foreign service officer, directly tied Trump to the quid pro quo. Marie Yovanovich, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, offered riveting testimony that she had been replaced by Trump at Giuliani’s urging because of her persistent efforts to combat corruption in Ukraine. But John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, and Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, refused to appear for their depositions, continuing the stonewalling by Trump’s political appointees.
Gordon Sondland proved to be the one exception. Sondland, whose sudden involvement in Ukraine policy was troubling to the career diplomats (he was a wealthy hotel owner and Republican donor who had become Trump’s ambassador to the European Union), initially testified that there was no quid pro quo. But on November 20, apparently having considered that his statements under oath had placed him in legal jeopardy, he “updated” his testimony, forthrightly acknowledging that he had told Ukrainian officials that the military aid and a presidential visit were conditioned on the investigations that Trump demanded. His testimony also implicated Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Bolton, Mulvaney, and Giuliani as the other central players in the drama.43
With the facts emerging clearly, on December 4 the House Judiciary Committee convened its first impeachment hearing to evaluate whether the Ukraine quid pro quo met the historic standard for impeachment under the Constitution. Four law professors—Noah Feldman from Harvard, Pamela Karlan from Stanford, Michael Gerhardt from the University of North Carolina, and Jonathan Turley from George Washington University—agreed on the bedrock principle: the president, unlike the king of England, was not above the law.
“Congress could oversee the president’s conduct, hold him accountable and remove him from office if he abused his power,” Feldman stated. They agreed that impeachable offenses were acts that “abused the public trust” and “relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Karlan noted that “the essence of an impeachable offense is a president’s decision to sacrifice the national interest for his own private ends.”44
The combination of two of the framers’ core concerns—foreign influence on the president and threats to the integrity of elections—can create a combustible problem, Karlan observed:
In his farewell address, President Washington warned that “history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.” And he explained that this was in part because foreign governments would try and foment disagreement among the American people and influence what we thought. The very idea that a president might seek the aid of a foreign government in his re-election campaign would have horrified them. But based on the evidentiary record, that is what President Trump has done. . . . Put simply, a candidate for president should resist foreign interference in our elections, not demand it.45
The constitutional law professors were not impressed with the argument that the decision about Trump’s stewardship must be left to the voters. “The framers believed that elections were not a sufficient check on the possibility of a president who abused his power by acting in a corrupt way,” Feldman stated. “They were especially worried that a president might use the power of his office to influence the election in his favor. They concluded that the Constitution must provide for the impeachment of the president to assure that no one would be above the law.”46
Feldman, Karlan, and Gerhardt, all of whom had been invited by the Democrats, concluded that the evidence of impeachment was overwhelming. Turley, the Republican invitee, disagreed: “If the House proceeds solely on the Ukrainian allegations, this impeachment would stand out among modern impeachments as the shortest proceeding with the thinnest evidentiary record, and the narrowest grounds ever used to impeach a president.” Ironically, Turley’s point, which McConnell and other Republicans would repeatedly cite, was the exact reason that many Democrats thought Trump should have been impeached for inviting Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, engaging in obstruction of justice, and not combating another round of Russian interference in 2020. Still, even Turley noted that “the use of military aid for a quid pro quo, if proven, can be an impeachable offense.”47 To acquit President Trump, the Senate Republicans would have to disregard both the damning facts and the clear intentions of the nation’s founders. No one doubted that they would meet the challenge.
The day following the legal scholars’ testimony, Pelosi instructed the Judiciary Committee to draft articles of impeachment, and on December 9 the lawyers for the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees presented two impeachment articles, accusing the president of abusing his office and obstructing Congress in its efforts to investigate and hold him accountable. These articles were debated and approved by a fiercely divided Judiciary Committee, on a straight partisan vote of 23–17, on December 12. “It’s a horrible thing to be using the tool of impeachment, which is supposed to be used in an emergency,” Trump told reporters, an ironic formulation from a president who had cried “emergency” to justify funding the border wall despite Congress’s votes to the contrary and slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from friendly nations.
Five days later, with his impeachment imminent, Trump unleashed a single-spaced letter, which ran more than five pages. “The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee articles are not recognizable under any Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, no offenses at all. You have cheapened the importance of a very ugly word, impeachment,” Trump wrote. He claimed without justification that his rights had been denied and accused the whistleblower of lying. He attacked Pelosi for “declaring open war on democracy. . . . You are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’ when you know it is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense.” Trump raged on, repeating his anger about the 2016 election and what he called the “witch hunt” conducted by Mueller. But he could not halt the process that his July 25 phone call had set in motion.
On December 18, Speaker Pelosi gaveled the House to order to vote on the articles of impeachment, which resulted in virtually straight party-line results: 230–197 for the first article and 229–198 for the second. As the votes were being cast, Trump took the stage at a campaign rally in Battle Creek, Michigan. In an extraordinary scene, he railed against the Democrats as thousands of his supporters responded in real time to the vote. It was the only time in American history that a president held a political rally of his supporters while being impeached. More than six thousand supporters, who had braved the cold, cheered as Trump bragged about Republican unity. “The Republican Party has never been so affronted, but they’ve never been so united,” he bellowed.48
Year three of the aberrational Trump presidency had come to an end, with Donald Trump now the third president in American history to be impeached. Yet the US government continued to function. Less than twenty-four hours after the impeachment vote, the House voted, 385–41, to approve historic legislation to implement the new US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA). Months of tough, substantive, honest negotiations between United States trade representative Robert Lighthizer and the House and Senate trade committees had produced a remarkable result. NAFTA, bitterly controversial for almost thirty years, was modernized and changed in a way that won broad support from business, labor, and nongovernmental organizations. Progressive Democrats endorsed the deal after a series of concessions on key issues of importance to them, including new requirements on rules of origin and wage rates that would benefit autoworkers in the United States and Canada. “On every conceivable front, we have improved the old NAFTA,” said Richard Neal, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, two of the harshest Democratic critics of free trade deals, supported the new USMCA.49 Frustrated Democrats, who had seen Mitch McConnell block Senate consideration of more than 275 House-passed bills in the past year, could take pride in a singular accomplishment.50 So could Senate Republicans, who once feared that Trump’s antitrade policy would end NAFTA and undermine North American supply chains.
In the same week, the Senate broke a months-long logjam to pass a $738 billion defense bill by an overwhelming vote of 86–8. The legislation contained several victories for Trump, including the authorization of the Space Force that he had proposed as a sixth branch of the American military. The bill also provided twelve weeks of paid parental leave for civilian federal employees, a Democratic priority that had also been embraced by Jared Kushner. And it contained a series of provisions rebuking Russia, China, and Turkey, nations that had aroused bipartisan anger on the Hill. “Let the vote be so overwhelming that there isn’t a military family in America who could doubt our commitment to them,” proclaimed Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “Let’s use our vote to send a message to Russia and China that we’re revitalizing America’s power so we can win the competition for influence that will shape the kind of world our children and grandchildren are going to live in.”51 The overwhelming votes on both pieces of legislation showed that the congressional process could still work when capable legislators and administration officials engaged in good-faith negotiations to attack the nation’s problems.
It was, in many respects, a fitting end to Trump’s third year. His presidency continued to move on two distinct tracks. On one track, he led an administration whose policies were disruptive and often extreme but could be debated, contested, compromised about, or ultimately reversed through intense but normal political engagement. American voters could pass judgment on Trump’s record on trade, immigration, education, health care, the environment, race, and policies toward China, Iran, and Israel. But on the second track, Trump was conducting an unprecedented assault on the rule of law and the Constitution, jeopardizing national security, and undermining assumptions about shared facts and reality.