The dynamic of Donald Trump, American president's impeachment trial in the United States Senate is pretty much set. The House managers present evidence that the president extorted a foreign government until they attacked American democracy for his personal benefit. The president's defense team makes loud noises about how there was NO PRESSURE! and they don't like Adam Schiff. And Senate Republicans pretend they can't see anything amiss, and keep voting along strict party lines to reject new evidence and witnesses. Why would you need any of that for a trial?

As predictable as all of this is with Mitch McConnell behind the wheel, it does seem like a harbinger of things to come. Every Republican officeholder's complete and total fealty to Donald Trump is a sight to behold. Cowardice and a supreme lack of ethics certainly play a role, but maybe some of them also see themselves as potential vassals of The Leader if he's re-elected and hardens his authoritarian grip. This has led to otherwise bland-seeming senatorial types jumping on the cable news teevee to flex their Trumpian credentials. As demonstrated by Senator Mike Braun in a display he thought was so dope he tweeted it himself, this mostly involves a thuggish rejection of objective reality.

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REPORTER: 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?



BRAUN: No, I'm not saying that's okay. I'm not saying that's appropriate. I'm saying that it DIDN'T HAPPEN. pic.twitter.com/nARMXL1KEz — Senator Mike Braun (@SenatorBraun) January 23, 2020

There is simply no way that the senator from Indiana honestly believes the president has never "asked a foreign leader to investigate a political rival." Here he is doing it on television:

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Wow, the tomato man asked two different countries to investigate a domestic political opponent there!

Maybe Braun's beef is with the "withhold foreign aid to coerce him into doing so." Except Trump's chief-of-staff, Mick Mulvaney, already admitted in public that they withheld the aid as part of a quid pro quo. One of Trump's new arguments is that other administrations have withheld aid in the past, hoping that the public can't make a distinction between withholding aid based on issues of the national interest and withholding aid until they ratfuck your domestic political opponent. But the implicit admission there is that Trump ordered the hold, which we already knew, and which the Government Accountability Office found to be a crime. Meanwhile, Ambassador Bill Taylor testified under oath that the military aid was linked to the Ukrainians announcing a Biden investigation, and contemporaneous texts back this.

You’d expect this from, say, Lindsey Graham. Alex Wong Getty Images

Trump's lawyers are also tacitly admitting this with one dimension of their arguments: that abuse of power does not constitute an impeachable offense. That is different than saying he didn't do what he's accused of—it's an argument around the severity of the offense. Yet Braun seems to be on a different page of the book, maybe one marked "October 2019." Or maybe the Trumpists simply flit between all the pages, sometimes all at once, trying to bury the public in bullshit so no one can see the plain truth of what happened. It is in no doubt, which is why the president and his allies refuse to allow direct witnesses to the scheme to testify. If it was all on the up-and-up, surely these public servants can honor their obligations to abide by congressional oversight powers, take the oath, and explain why it was all on the up-and-up.

They won't, of course, in part because Senator Mike Braun has repeatedly voted against it. He doesn't want to know—or, more precisely, he doesn't want you to know. He's hoping you tune out, and they skip through the sham trial, and the economy stays strong enough that Trump can eke out a victory in November against an opponent who will without doubt be ratfucked by actors foreign and domestic. It's telling, though, that Braun doesn't just watch this play out while trying to blend in with the wallpaper. He senses opportunity here, and that should give us all pause.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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