Before we begin to grapple with the gravity of the impeachment inquiry that is now upon us, can we acknowledge yet again the extreme weirdness of our times? If, through the distorting mists of time, the heroes and antiheroes of the Watergate saga seem positively Shakespearean in their stature—Nixon raging on the heath, his cunning satraps devising their poisoned betrayals—what to make of today’s dramatis personae of Kiev and Washington, Presidents Zelensky and Trump, one a comic actor turned fledgling statesman, the other a real-estate grifter turned . . . political grifter? Scholars of the Volodymyr Zelensky filmography will recall his appearances in “Love in the Big City 2” and “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon.” And they will credit his work in the television show “Servant of the People,” in which he played the President of Ukraine, a role that set him on the path to being the actual President of Ukraine. Zelensky is an expressive comic artist. And so it is not hard to imagine his mask of terrorized bewilderment as he held a telephone to his ear in July and listened to the ex-star of “The Apprentice” deliver an implicit threat to deprive his country of military aid and diplomatic standing if he failed to interfere in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election on Trump’s behalf. This is our reality.

Into this reality has stepped, if belatedly, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, Speaker of the House.

From the start, Pelosi has confronted Trump with a wry fearlessness. When, in a moment of rare self-aggrandizement, Trump referred to himself as an “extremely stable genius,” she replied, “When the ‘extremely stable genius’ starts acting more Presidential, I’ll be happy to work with him on infrastructure, trade, and other issues.” In an Oval Office confrontation last year, she brooked no disrespect from Trump and asked that he please not underestimate “the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats.” When, on another occasion, Trump referred to Pelosi as a “mess,” the Speaker thoughtfully suggested that the President might benefit from an “intervention for the good of the country.”

Read More Susan B. Glasser on the forty-eight hours that sealed Trump’s impeachment.

For months, however, Pelosi avoided the ultimate intervention. She frustrated many members of the Democratic caucus who believed—for myriad reasons, some contained in the Mueller report, some not—that they should pursue an impeachment inquiry against the President. Pelosi was reluctant, worried that there was not enough evidence to prevent a backfire scenario, in which Trump would emerge from impeachment still safely in office, emboldened, unchallenged by his own party, a martyr with an enhanced prospect at reëlection.

“Remember this,” Pelosi told me, in an interview on Thursday afternoon, as she recalled the Watergate era. “I saw, as a young person, that the Republicans didn’t come around until the tapes. It wasn’t like they were saying, ‘This behavior is not acceptable to us.’ The tapes were dispositive of the issue. There was no vote to impeach, because it was so clear that he had to go. But even Nixon knew of his responsibility to the country. I’m not sure this person does.”

For months, Pelosi dismissed impeachment as a bad political idea. As the leader of the Democratic caucus in the House, she deals with a fairly broad ideological range of members, from the Progressives to the Blue Dogs. She prides herself on her ability to listen, to negotiate, to cajole, to unite. In countless attack ads, Republicans have painted her as a dread San Francisco lefty, and they also point out her considerable wealth—the big house in Pacific Heights, the Napa Valley vineyard. And yet she got her political education, her capacity for infighting and vote-counting, not in Pacific Heights but by watching her father on the stump. Pelosi is the daughter of an old-school pol, Tom D’Alesandro, Jr., a onetime congressman and mayor of Baltimore.

Even though many Democratic House members admire Pelosi’s skills, particularly the way she spearheaded the intricate legislative battle for the Affordable Care Act, in 2009, some thought that she was too cautious about impeachment. She was, in fact, wary of the polls, which were telling her that only a minority of the electorate favored impeachment; she had a clear memory of Bill Clinton emerging from his impeachment drama with soaring approval numbers. Pelosi and other centrist Democrats were convinced that winning in 2020 was the highest priority. She routinely pointed out that the Democratic win in the 2018 midterms leaned heavily on the electoral battle in the suburbs of such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The same strategy, she maintained, would lead to a victory in 2020.

Her antagonists on the issue of impeachment argued that Trump was beyond salvation and that their job was to lead, not follow, the public. They insisted that the Clinton episode was not an apt comparison for Trump. Not only were Trump’s sins vastly worse; Clinton always had higher poll numbers than Trump, whose base has always been at around forty per cent. The debate among Democrats over impeachment grew increasingly fractious and public. “In terms of subpoena power, you have to handle it with care,” she told the Times, last year. “Yes, on the left there is a Pound of Flesh Club, and they just want to do to them what they did to us. . . . I have those who want to be for impeachment and for abolishing ICE. Two really winning issues for us, right? In the districts we have to win? I don’t even think they’re the right things to do. If the evidence from Mueller is compelling, it should be compelling for Republicans as well, and that may be a moment of truth. But that’s not where we are.”

Now Pelosi, with the Ukrainian issue out in the open, has changed course. It is not clear that she had a choice. She has endorsed a full-scale impeachment inquiry because of the news that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate one of his political rivals, former Vice-President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden, as a “favor” to Trump. A still unnamed whistle-blower in the intelligence community drafted a sophisticated, detailed letter saying that White House officials had witnessed the President abusing his office “for personal gain” and then had tried to “lock down” evidence of his conversation with Zelensky. Trump, according to a memorandum describing the call, pressed Zelensky to dig up dirt on the Biden family and made it evident that American military aid and high-level diplomatic relations might depend on that coöperation. Trump also asked Zelensky and his aides to deal with his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and with Attorney General William Barr, who, he suggested, might help in such an investigation.

After learning, over the weekend, about Trump’s fevered communications with the Ukrainian leadership, Pelosi, who was in New York, called her deputy, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, to say that she had decided to back an impeachment inquiry. As she was flying back to Washington, she read an op-ed in the Washington Post in which seven centrist Democrats who had resisted an impeachment effort said that they had now changed their minds. Even if she’d wanted to, it undoubtedly would have been near-impossible to resist her caucus now. Pelosi started drafting a speech, but accidentally left her notes on the plane. Nevertheless, in a brief statement announcing the new course, on Tuesday, she found her voice. Trump’s unvarnished message to Zelensky, she said, represented a “betrayal of his oath of office.”