On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin’s Russian government followed through on a lengthy series of threats and launched an invasion of its neighbors in Ukraine. The result was one of the most dramatic international challenges of the post–Cold War era, creating hundreds of thousands of casualties, a refugee crisis, and an uprooted global marketplace for everything from oil to food.
But in the United States, there was a political dimension to the crisis that unfolded nearly three years earlier, which had a direct impact on the war itself.
The public first learned of the Trump administration’s Ukraine scandal on September 5, 2019, when the editorial board of the Washington Post published a stunning piece alleging that the president had delayed U.S. military support for Ukraine as part of an attempt to force Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to “intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.”1
The editorial added, “Mr. Trump is not just soliciting Ukraine’s help with his presidential campaign; he is using U.S. military aid the country desperately needs in an attempt to extort it.”
What the Post’s editors described was, for all intents and purposes, an organized crime shakedown, launched by the sitting president of the United States. “It’s a nice aid package we have here, which you need as Russia breathes down your neck,” the Republican effectively told his foreign counterpart. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
The Post’s piece proved to be one of the most important editorials in American history, but the news didn’t come out of nowhere. A week earlier, Politico published a report shining a light on the fact that the Trump administration was “slow-walking $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine,”2 to the great frustration of officials who were eager to help the U.S. ally deter Russian aggression. But at the time, many observers assumed the funds hadn’t yet reached Kyiv for bureaucratic reasons.
The Post’s editorial recontextualized the details: this wasn’t a dynamic in which an incompetent administration struggled to honor an international commitment; it was a situation in which the White House deliberately chose not to honor a commitment because of a presidential election plot.
A few months earlier, Trump was interviewed by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and raised some eyebrows by suggesting he was open to receiving campaign assistance from foreign governments. The president envisioned a scenario in which a politician is offered dirt on an opponent from foreign sources and mocked the very idea of alerting the FBI to the outreach. “Give me a break,” he said. “Life doesn’t work that way.”3
The president added, “There’s nothing wrong with listening.” Asked why he’d want foreign interference in American elections, Trump went on to say, “They have information, I think I’d take it.”
At the time, the on-air comments were seen as controversial in part because of his indifference to his own country’s rule of law, and in part because Trump had received and benefited from Russian assistance three years earlier. He also seemed to signal to his prospective international benefactors that he would welcome their interference in his reelection efforts.
But the revelations about Ukraine put the comments in a new light: the Republican wasn’t just open to the possibility of campaign support from foreign governments, he was also willing to use his office to leverage foreign governments into giving his political operation a boost.
In the wake of the Post’s editorial, as Congress learned of an administration whistleblower who’d filed a complaint in the matter, key details came into focus, including a July 2019 call between the U.S. and Ukrainian presidents. The phone meeting came a week after Trump directed the State and Defense departments to withhold nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine.4 The Republican initially shrugged off the controversy, telling reporters his phone meeting with Zelensky was “nice” and “beautiful.”5 He soon after added that the call was “absolutely perfect,” and the whistleblower was responsible for a “false alarm.”6
Reality soon proved otherwise. After months in which Democratic leaders in Congress rebuffed impeachment calls, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi grudgingly announced a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019. As the House speaker saw it, the White House hadn’t left her with much of a choice: the evidence showed the president withheld congressionally approved military assistance to a vulnerable ally as part of an illicit extortion scheme.
Hours later, Trump declared via social media that he’d authorized the release of an “unredacted transcript” of the July 25 call with Zelensky, which he said would prove that it was nothing more than “a very friendly and totally appropriate call,” in which he asserted “no pressure” on his foreign counterpart. The following morning, the Republican added, “Will the Democrats apologize after seeing what was said on the call with the Ukrainian President?”7
The White House then released an official call summary, detailing the phone meeting. It was vastly worse than even Trump’s detractors expected. The five-page document showed the Ukrainian leader hoping to secure U.S. support in the face of Russian aggression, only to hear Trump say he was open to the possibility, though the American told him, “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”8
The “favor” was a multifaceted request in which Trump wanted Zelensky to “look into” Joe Biden, coordinate with Rudy Giuliani as the former mayor sought dirt on the president’s likely 2020 opponent, talk to Attorney General William Barr about the findings, and explore conspiracy theories related to Hillary Clinton.
There was nothing subtle about any of this. The Republican had presented his counterpart in Kyiv with a quid pro quo: Trump, who’d blocked congressionally approved aid from reaching Ukraine, wanted Zelensky to cooperate with his election plot. The White House had voluntarily shared what was effectively a smoking gun—Trump had obviously prioritized his own electoral interests above the nation’s foreign policy—and the idea that Democratic lawmakers would “apologize after seeing what was said on the call” was exposed as foolish.
Making matters worse, a day later, Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, released a declassified version of the original whistleblower complaint in which the unnamed official expressed concern that the president was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country.”9
The same complaint alleged a cover-up—White House officials were concerned enough about Trump’s comments to Zelensky that they took steps to “lock down” a transcript of the conversation—leaving little doubt that even many of those around the president realized that he’d gone too far.
As the scandal intensified, congressional Republicans generally found themselves at a loss for words. Hoping to buy some time, Senator Pat Toomey appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said, “Look, it is not appropriate for any candidate for federal office—certainly, including a sitting president—to ask for assistance from a foreign country. That’s not appropriate. But I don’t know that that’s what happened here.”10
It quickly became painfully obvious that the Pennsylvanian was actually understating matters: Trump not only sought foreign assistance, he also pursued his goal by leveraging desperately needed military assistance.
A month into the ordeal, with an impeachment inquiry underway, the American president sat down with the Ukrainian president at the United Nations. A reporter asked Trump, “Would you like President Zelensky to do more on Joe Biden and the investigation?” The Republican replied, “No, I want him to do whatever he can.”11 Trump repeated the appeal days later, telling reporters on the White House South Lawn, “I would say that President Zelensky, if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.”12
A variety of political observers did a double take. Facing impeachment over pressuring a foreign leader to cooperate with his electoral goals, Trump did it again—twice—and this time, he did it on camera for all the world to see.
Around this time, some of the president’s allies specifically took aim at whether the underlying extortion plot necessarily included a quid pro quo. The official call summary showed Trump talking about military aid and the “favor” he wanted Zelensky to perform, but, some GOP voices suggested,13 the American president didn’t literally and explicitly say that he’d provide security support in exchange for anti-Biden dirt. If there was no actual quid pro quo, the argument went, then perhaps the impeachment effort lacked merit.
Republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, for example, said, “There was no quid pro quo; you’d have to have that if there was going to be anything wrong.” House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows, months before formally joining Trump’s team in the West Wing, emphasized the same point via social media, publishing a variety of tweets about the absence of a quid pro quo.14
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney nevertheless proceeded to shred this line of argument in October 2019, telling the press that Trump really did hold up Ukraine aid for political reasons. “I have news for everybody: Get over it,” he said. “There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”15
When a reporter explained to Mulvaney that he’d “just described a quid pro quo,” the chief of staff replied, “We do that all the time with foreign policy.”
A congressional Republican described the comments as “totally inexplicable,” adding, “He literally said the thing the president and everyone else said did not happen.”16 Marveling at the confession, Democrat Adam Schiff added, “Mr. Mulvaney’s acknowledgment means that things have gone from very, very bad to much, much worse.”
The chief of staff tried to reverse course a few hours later,17 issuing a statement that said the opposite of what he’d articulated in the White House press briefing room earlier that afternoon, but by that point it was too late.
It wasn’t just the chief of staff. Bill Taylor, Trump’s top diplomat to Ukraine, told Congress that Trump was directly involved in an explicit scheme to leverage both military aid and a White House meeting as part of a plan to coerce Ukraine into participating in Trump’s political scheme.18
A week later, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the White House National Security Council, told lawmakers that he personally listened in on the Trump-Zelensky call as part of his official duties. “I was concerned by the call,” he testified. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine.”19
Gordon Sondland, the Trump administration’s ambassador to the European Union, proceeded to tell House impeachment investigators that he told a Ukrainian official U.S. military aid had been locked—and to unlock it, the administration expected Kyiv to move forward with the anti-Biden investigation, which Trump could then use for domestic political purposes.20
David Holmes, a career foreign service officer, told congressional investigators he overheard a phone conversation in which Trump personally pressed Sondland about whether the Ukrainian government would help him go after Biden.21
As the impeachment inquiry in the House proceeded, attention turned to testimony from witnesses requested specifically by Republican members of the Judiciary Committee. The expectation was that they’d provide information that cast the White House in a more favorable light. The opposite happened: Tim Morrison, the former top National Security Council official for Russia and European affairs, said he heard Sondland tell a top Zelensky aide that Ukraine would have to announce an anti-Biden investigation “as a condition” before the Trump administration would lift its hold on military support.22
The same week, the Washington Post uncovered hundreds of documents from the White House Counsel’s Office, showing that after the impeachment inquiry began, Trump aides scrambled to “generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision” the president had already made to block assistance for Ukraine.23 A related New York Times report added that after the White House put a hold on aid to Ukraine, Mulvaney asked budget officials “whether there was a legal justification” that might defend the steps the president had already taken.24
As the congressional hearings came to an end, the scandal was sorely lacking in ambiguities. It was as if the political world had played a game of Clue, and investigators had solved the case and identified the culprit: it was the desperate president, in the West Wing, with his phone. Each of the relevant players knew who was responsible for the misdeeds. The questions about how, when, and why the misdeeds were committed had clear answers. The riddle had a solution.
The Associated Press published a rather brutal analysis shortly before Thanksgiving 2019, highlighting the “mountain of evidence” that was uncontested and “beyond dispute.”25 The facts, the AP added, were “confirmed by a dozen witnesses, mostly staid career government officials who served both Democratic and Republican administrations. They relied on emails, text messages and contemporaneous notes to back up their recollections.”
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote in an opinion column the same day, “After this week’s impeachment testimony, if Republicans continue to insist that Dear Leader President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong—and they might do just that—then the GOP has surrendered any claim to being a political party. It would be a full-fledged cult of personality.”26
It was also on that day when Politico reported, “Even as Democrats felt that they had made an ironclad case that Trump had abused the power of his office by pressuring a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 election, they were no closer to persuading even a single House Republican to join them in voting to impeach the president.”27
To the extent that GOP lawmakers turned to Trump to provide them with defenses they could use on his behalf, the president was little use. On the eve of his impeachment, the Republican wrote a hysterical letter to the House speaker, accusing Pelosi of having “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment” and said she was “declaring open war on American Democracy” by taking steps to hold him accountable for obvious wrongdoing.
It was as if people close to Trump saw him on the verge of a breakdown, encouraged him to unburden himself, and sat back as he did exactly that, in writing—tying together self-pity, conspiracy theories, idiosyncratic grammar, and a primal scream—at which point he thought it’d be a good idea to send his stream-of-consciousness tantrum to Capitol Hill.
Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist, said Trump’s letter was “pure crazy, weapons-grade nuts.”28 Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, added that future scholars would need to be assured that the official White House correspondence “was not, in fact, a crayon-scribbled manifesto discovered in the shack of a lunatic.”29
Or put another way, as lawmakers prepared to vote on his impeachment, the sitting president simply couldn’t think of an intelligible defense for his actions.
Those looking for an excuse to brush off the revelations also found little help from outside Capitol Hill. Ahead of the floor vote in the House, more than 750 legal scholars issued a joint statement concluding that Trump was guilty of “impeachable conduct.”30 They added, “His conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.” Soon after, an even larger group of historians signed on to a related statement, condemning the president’s “flagrant abuses of power” and insisting that his actions “urgently and justly require his impeachment.”31
For congressional Republicans, it didn’t matter. During the impeachment inquiry, many GOP members didn’t bother to show up for depositions32 and refused to read relevant transcripts.33 It surprised no one when the House approved two articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, and the measures received literally zero Republican votes.34
As attention shifted to the GOP-led Senate, it hardly seemed possible for the available facts to get any worse, but they did. In early 2020, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog agency that conducts audits and investigations for Congress, concluded that the White House’s Ukraine scheme wasn’t just an abuse, it was also illegal.35 “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO found.
Senator Patrick Leahy, in his forty-fifth year on Capitol Hill, said in reference to the GAO’s findings, “I have never seen such a damning report in my life.” The Vermont Democrat added, “I read it twice.”
Around the same time, John Bolton, Trump’s former White House national security advisor, leaked word that he, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo privately urged the president over the summer to pursue a more responsible course on U.S. policy toward Kyiv.36 Trump, in Bolton’s telling, refused.
All the while, the president’s penchant for dishonesty managed to get worse. As the Republican obsessively told the public that he was part of “a perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian leader, CNN’s Daniel Dale examined Trump’s defenses related to the scandal and found a president who was guilty of “compulsive” mendacity.37 “President Donald Trump is dishonest about a whole lot of things. But he is rarely as comprehensively dishonest as he has been about his dealings with Ukraine and the impeachment process,” the CNN fact-checker explained.
A related Washington Post report added that the president had made falsehoods “central” to his impeachment defense, pushing a series of demonstrable lies that “crashed headlong” into reality.38
Complicating matters, Republicans put themselves at a rhetorical disadvantage before the impeachment trial even began. After the controversy first erupted, many went on record saying that if Trump had tried to extort a U.S. ally with a quid pro quo scheme, that might very well be a bridge too far.39 Those comments, however, came before an avalanche of evidence landed on top of the Oval Office.
It left the party in an uncertain position after Trump was formally impeached. To resolve the conflict, several prominent GOP voices tried to thread a difficult needle: the president was guilty, they effectively conceded, but the misdeeds didn’t warrant removal from office.
Republican senator Lamar Alexander, for example, said in a written statement that Trump’s guilt had “already been proven”; the president’s actions were clearly “inappropriate”; and the House impeachment managers successfully proved their case.40 The Tennessean said he’d vote to acquit anyway.
Alexander had some company in the partisan Senate contingent. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Ohio’s Rob Portman, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey drew similar conclusions and made no effort to deny what was plainly true.41 But while each rejected the validity of Trump’s woeful defenses, and conceded that the allegations had merit, they also said they weren’t comfortable removing their party’s president from office.
Those attitudes were echoed by GOP voters. An early January poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that roughly a third of rank-and-file Republicans at the national level agreed that Trump crossed legal lines with his scheme, but most of those voters wanted him to remain in office anyway.42
Ultimately, following a trial in which some GOP senators ignored oral arguments—Kentucky’s Rand Paul was seen doing crossword puzzles,43 despite having sworn an oath to take the process seriously—and the president’s lawyers focused on procedural concerns in order to avoid focusing on their client’s actions, Trump was acquitted. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah was the sole GOP senator to vote “guilty” on one of the impeachment articles.
Two days later, the president condemned what had transpired as a “hoax.” It was an opening shot in the war on the recent past.
Rewriting the story of the ordeal was a seemingly impossible task. The party was reluctant to let the scandal go unchallenged—2020 was an election year, after all—but they’d spent months trying to find a flaw in the case and come up empty. There was no credible counternarrative. Trump did what he was accused of doing.
Republicans settled on a brute-force rhetorical strategy built on playing a shameless game of make-believe. The public had just seen the facts presented in unflinching detail. In the GOP’s counternarrative, Democrats failed to make their case, rushed an unjust process without cause, and engaged in congressional overreach for purely partisan reasons.
At times, it led the party to adopt a head-spinning up-is-down, day-is-night posture. Republican representative Debbie Lesko of Arizona, for example, was asked whether she believed it was all right for an American president to ask a foreign power to investigate a political rival. “He didn’t,” the congresswoman replied, reality be damned.44 “He didn’t do that. . . . He did not do that.”
A reporter also asked Senator Mike Braun, “So you’re saying that it’s okay for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and withhold foreign aid to coerce him into doing so?” The Indiana Republican was incredulous about uncontested factual details. “No, I’m not saying that’s okay; I’m not saying that’s appropriate,” he replied.45 “I’m saying that it didn’t happen.”
Working in the party’s favor, at least as far as their propaganda campaign was concerned, was a series of events that overshadowed Trump’s Ukraine fiasco. In February 2020, the Senate’s impeachment trial reached its conclusion. In March 2020, Covid gripped New York City, with the rest of the country soon to follow. In the months that followed, Americans confronted a series of other historic developments—George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota, the 2020 election, the January 6 attack, an unprecedented second presidential impeachment process, et al.—which helped push Trump’s first impeachment further from view.
But even after Biden’s inauguration, the scandal remained a point of preoccupation for his party. In March 2022, after Russia’s Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, a Capitol Hill reporter asked House Minority Whip Steve Scalise about the 2019 scandal, and its renewed relevance in light of the war. The Louisiana Republican replied: “You look at that conversation, President Zelensky had called President Trump to thank him for the leadership that he provided. In fact, when Zelensky got elected, he said he modeled his campaign after President Trump’s—and ultimately he got the relief money he was asking for. . . . President Trump stood with President Zelensky.”
He really didn’t. Zelensky had said a variety of complimentary things to Trump in 2019, but that was because the Ukrainian leader was desperate for the White House’s support. As for the fact that Kyiv “ultimately” received the assistance it sought, that’s true, but what Scalise brushed past were the scandalous and legally dubious events that preceded the delivery.
A year later, the party wouldn’t let it go. In August 2023, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas told Fox News that Democrats “abused the impeachment power” by holding Trump accountable for the Ukraine scandal, adding that the allegations were “bogus” and “not well grounded factually or legally.” A month later, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, while competing against Trump for the GOP’s presidential nomination, derided the fact that Democrats pursued an impeachment case in 2019 based on little more than “a phone call to Ukraine.”46
The same week, GOP representative Ken Buck of Colorado wrote an op-ed condemning Trump’s first impeachment as “a disgrace to the Constitution and a disservice to Americans.”47 House Speaker Mike Johnson added soon after that the 2019 impeachment was a “sham.”48
Around the same time, House Republicans approved a formal censure resolution condemning Adam Schiff, denouncing the California Democrat for having helped launch the 2019 impeachment effort—as if this were itself somehow evidence of wrongdoing.
All the while, Republican congressional leaders spoke frequently and publicly about a radical idea that would allow the party to try to erase the matter from the Congressional Record altogether, even if it couldn’t erase the scandal and its consequences from our memories.
Indeed, as the impeachment proceedings neared their end in the Senate, Speaker Pelosi acknowledged the fact that the president’s Republican allies were likely to acquit him, but she quickly added that such a verdict would not invalidate the process or render the charges irrelevant.
“I think that we have pulled back a veil of behavior totally unacceptable to our founders, and that the public will see this with a clearer eye, an unblurred eye,” the California Democrat said in February 2020, referring to the president.49 Pelosi added, “Whatever happens, he has been impeached forever.”
The assessment certainly made sense. For Trump’s critics, the Ukraine scandal that led to his impeachment left a stain that would not wash off. The debacle would not soon fade from memory; it would instead help define his scandal-plagued tenure.
The Republican himself, however, didn’t quite see it that way.
“Should they expunge the impeachment in the House?” the president rhetorically asked reporters at the White House on the heels of the Senate trial. Answering his own question, “They should because it was a hoax.”50
In other words, as Trump saw it, there was no reason to allow the controversy to tarnish his legacy. As far as he was concerned, the underlying scandal had been discredited to his satisfaction, and GOP lawmakers at their earliest opportunity could simply wipe the slate clean by holding a vote to erase his punishment—in effect, unimpeaching him, as part of some kind of unprecedented do-over resolution.
It wasn’t long before the president’s partisan allies threw their support behind the effort. A few weeks after the Senate trial concluded, Republican representative Lee Zeldin told a far-right website that he believed that if his party held a majority after the 2020 elections, “one of the very first orders of business” would be “to expunge the sham impeachment.”51 The New York congressman echoed the sentiment via social media, tweeting, “EXPUNGE the sham impeachment! President Trump, ACQUITTED FOR LIFE, should have never been impeached in the first place.”
After Democratic victories on Election Day 2020, the idea faded from view, only to return in 2022, when Republican representative Markwayne Mullin, ahead of his successful Senate campaign in Oklahoma, introduced a measure to expunge Trump’s impeachment from the record.52
As 2023 got underway, talk of “expungement” lingered. Within days of earning the gavel in early January, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened the door to undoing the former president’s impeachment, saying he “understood” why it was a GOP priority and vowing to take it seriously.53 Other House Republicans soon followed.54
Six months later, the idea took the next step when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene unveiled a resolution to undo Trump’s first impeachment, insisting that the former president had been “wrongfully accused of misconduct.”55 House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik, one of the cosponsors of the bill, said the goal was to tweak the record, and make it “as if such articles of impeachment had never passed the full House of Representatives” in the first place.
The point of the GOP effort, in other words, was to simply take what transpired and toss Trump’s first impeachment down the memory hole, as if the events had never occurred. Republicans were not content to simply vote against holding him accountable; much of the party felt compelled to erase the vote itself, rewriting recent history in the most audacious way possible.
From the perspective of the former president and his loyalists, there was no great mystery behind the motivation for the “expungement” push. Trump was caught extorting a U.S. ally, deliberately undermining Ukraine in the hopes of pressuring a foreign country to help him cheat in an election. Even his most ardent backers struggled to concoct a coherent defense.
But Republican efforts to rewrite the story—and perhaps even erase chapters the party found unpleasant—could not change the underlying facts about what transpired, even if the former president wished otherwise. (When a group of House GOP members took steps to strip Kevin McCarthy of his speaker’s gavel in 2023, Trump could’ve tried to rescue the Republican leader but chose not to. The former president later told McCarthy the speaker’s reluctance to move forward with an expungement effort was one of the main reasons he sat on his hands as the congressional leader floundered.56)
For Trump loyalists on Capitol Hill, the truth was nevertheless pushed aside. Republican representative Nancy Mace insisted in June 2023, for example, that the basis for Trump’s first impeachment was “based on a bed of lies,”57 none of which she could identify. The South Carolinian wasn’t in Congress in 2019, but she’d heard the ham-fisted counternarrative about the Ukraine scandal, and she liked it more than the truth.
To hear GOP leaders tell it, the devastating case against Trump—complete with details the party failed to even contest in a serious way—was simply not to be taken seriously. Party officials couldn’t think of a way to put a positive spin on the real story, so they did what they do far too often: they wrote a new one that wasn’t true.
When the party agreed to target President Biden with an impeachment inquiry of its own, his predecessor’s Ukraine scandal returned to the fore in ways Republicans saw as beneficial to Trump—though the closer one looked at the details, the more absurd the effort appeared.
In 2015, the Obama administration, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund, and other international organizations, leaned on the Ukrainian government to fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The rationale behind the push—which enjoyed bipartisan support on Capitol Hill at the time—was because Shokin was notoriously lax on investigating corruption.58 In his capacity as vice president, Biden played a prominent role in forcing Kyiv’s hand and forcing Shokin’s ouster.
Several years later, the Democrat’s partisan opponents, determined to even the score after Trump’s impeachments, clung to a conspiracy theory that Biden’s efforts were somehow connected to his son, Hunter, who played a role with a Ukrainian company, which in turn lent retroactive credence to Trump’s efforts.
The line of argument was literally unbelievable. For one thing, the conspiracy theory related to Hunter Biden was wholly unsupported by evidence, despite GOP lawmakers spending a year desperately searching for incriminating details. For another, the case against Biden was ultimately irrelevant: Trump didn’t have the authority to extort a U.S. ally for campaign assistance, even if the Republican thought he had a legitimate reason.
As for the consequences, the fallout from Trump’s scandal reverberated in dramatic fashion, and not just in the United States. The former president’s scheme, for example, left Ukraine weakened and vulnerable, and it was ultimately attacked by its Russian neighbor.
Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, explained in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, “There’s just a lot of evidence that Trump was wrong on this issue, and that in many ways, we undermined . . . Zelensky’s position in the eyes of Russia and Putin.”59
Adding insult to injury, by rewriting the story, the GOP helped establish a radical and potentially dangerous precedent: future American presidents have received an unmistakable message that they can get away with such tactics, just so long as their party is prepared to look the other way.
Shortly before Trump’s impeachment acquittal, Senator Susan Collins—who voted with her party despite the evidence, despite her reputation as one of her party’s more “moderate” members—made the case that Trump had already paid a price that would leave him chastened going forward.
“I believe that the president has learned from this case,” the Maine Republican said on CBS’s Face the Nation in February 2020. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”60 Collins added that Trump would have no choice but to be “much more cautious” in the future.
Others in the party embraced similar assumptions. Indiana’s Mike Braun said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think he’ll put two and two together. In this case, he was taken to the carpet.” Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander added a week later, “I would think [Trump] would think twice before he did it again.”
In July 2023, the former president headlined a campaign rally and called on Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until Congress received more information about the party’s anti-Biden conspiracy theories.
“Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles . . . to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ, and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” the former president told attendees,61 pointing to a Democratic scandal that existed only in his party’s imaginations. He added that Republicans who resisted his demands and supported Ukrainian aid anyway should face primary challenges.
Trump made these comments almost exactly four years to the day after the infamous phone meeting in which he tried to leverage military support for Zelensky’s campaign assistance.
It left the political world with a couple of unpleasant possibilities. It was possible that Collins and her allies in the GOP simply had it backward, and the president had learned nothing from his impeachment ordeal.
But it was also possible that Collins had inadvertently uncovered a more pernicious truth: after Trump and his party had rewritten the story to their liking, he “learned from this case” that Republicans would tolerate his abuses, no matter how brazen, creating accountability-free conditions for the corrupt former president.