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.

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“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.

The most interesting moments to be in Washington are when the conventional wisdom is shifting and not everyone knows it yet, or when an old certainty has been shredded and nothing has emerged to replace it. As of Monday morning, the political world was pretty sure that Donald Trump would not be impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives, and that he would enter the 2020 campaign and race to win reëlection, before the economy betrayed him with a recession that forecasters increasingly see as inevitable. Instead, over a remarkable day and a half, a new reality emerged: Donald Trump appears to have got himself impeached. Trump now seems all but certain not only to face an impeachment investigation but an actual impeachment vote in the House. And, whenever it happens, and whatever the specifics of the indictment turn out to be, the impeachment vote will have been triggered by a new scandal very much of his own making.

Nine o’clock on Monday night is more or less when the conventional wisdom collapsed. It was then that the Washington Post published a remarkable op-ed by seven key freshmen House Democrats from swing districts. They are known collectively on Capitol Hill as “majority makers” and “front-liners.” (In the case of the group’s five women, they have taken to calling themselves “the bad-ass caucus,” as CNN’s Dana Bash pointed out.) All seven served in national-security positions and previously had been reluctant to endorse impeachment proceedings. Now they had decided to hold hands and jump, together. “These allegations are a threat to all we have sworn to protect,” they wrote, calling Trump’s actions, if true, both illegal and grounds for impeachment. “This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand,” they wrote. Soon after, one by one, more House Democrats who had previously refused to support impeachment came out in favor of it. By 11 P.M., even close allies of Pelosi, such as Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Debbie Dingell, had switched sides. It was a Washington stampede.

Of course, Monday night may not have been the actual moment when the politics changed. You could date it backward a few days, to the previous Tuesday, when Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that a whistle-blower inside the U.S. intelligence community, who had information about serious wrongdoing, had come forward but that his complaint was not being shared with Congress, despite a law requiring its disclosure. In the following days it emerged that the subject of the complaint was Trump himself and that it involved Ukraine. By the weekend, Trump acknowledged that he spoke directly with Zelensky about investigating Biden, and news organizations were reporting that the President had personally held up the more than three hundred million dollars in aid to Ukraine eight days before their call. By Sunday, Schiff was on television suggesting that Democrats might now be finally ready to “cross the Rubicon” of impeachment.

Schiff, a close Pelosi ally, was signalling the political shift to come. On Monday afternoon, Pelosi had quietly given permission to her troops to bolt on impeachment, including to the op-ed signatories, with whom she privately met (as one of them, Representative Elissa Slotkin, later confirmed publicly). Remarkably, Democrats appeared to be making the decision to move on impeachment not because they believed it would benefit the Party politically. By Monday, polls still showed that a majority of Americans were firmly against it. Slotkin, who was elected in 2016 in a traditionally Republican district in Michigan, risks losing her seat. She and other Democrats seem to be proceeding despite the politics, not because of them.

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By Tuesday morning, there was a new conventional wisdom settling in, but Trump, up at the United Nations, in New York, for the annual General Assembly, did not seem to have received the message. At fifteen after ten that morning, he delivered a combative address to the assembled “globalists” about the failures of their internationalism and the benefits of his own, Trump-style nationalism. At one point, he lectured them about “wise leaders” who put the interests of their nations first, proving if nothing else that Trump is immune to irony.

In Washington, more Democrats called for impeachment. At noon, Representative John Lewis, the civil-rights hero, came to the House floor. “I truly believe the time to begin impeachment proceedings against this President has come. To delay or to do otherwise would betray the foundation of our democracy,” he said. He and other close allies of Pelosi in the Congressional Black Caucus had for months deferred to her on impeachment. His words now showed where the Speaker intended to end the day.