Just one day before the House is expected to pass articles of impeachment for the third time in history, President Trump sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter containing a bevy of falsehoods and a grain of truth positing his most effective possible defense.

To his detriment, Trump spends pages rehashing his fantastical narrative around Ukraine. In Trump's telling, Joe Biden didn't advance democratic interests in firing the corrupt Viktor Shokin but rather wanted Shokin fired because he went too easy on companies involved in Putin-aligned industries such as Burisma Holdings. Trump uses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's breathless assertions that he didn't feel pressured by the United States, all while the available evidence indicates that Zelensky felt pressured all the way back in the spring.

Trump makes no substantive defense against the plausible abuse of power charge or the ridiculous "obstruction of Congress" charge. But he does excoriate impeachment to the most effective degree that Democrats have ignored: a vast swath of the public cannot take this seriously when the opposition has sought to impeach Trump from day one of his presidency.

In terrifically Trumpy fashion, the president writes:



Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party's impeachment effort has been going on for 'two and a half years,' long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, 'The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun.' Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, 'I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached.' House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country's best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) — who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office, 'We're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf****r.' Representative Al Green said in May, 'I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.' Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!



With the sole exception of two words, "totally appropriate," every utterance of Trump's above claims is true.

Democrats have conducted a three-year-long investigation in search of a crime, and Trump just happened to be dumb enough to give them one. Yet, the public still doesn't care for the same reason no one ultimately believed the boy who cried wolf. Making a case that a president ought to be impeached for a noncriminal abuse of power involving a foreign power considered relatively obscure to most of the public isn't easy. It's orders of magnitude more difficult when Democrats made it clear from the start that they'd impeach Trump for the crime of his very occupation of the Oval Office.

The abuse of power case against Trump is grounded in an ugly reality, and at every step of the way, Democrats have undercut it with procedural hastiness and poor messaging. But Trump is right: Democrats baked the public divide over impeachment into the cake when they decided to determine their verdict not at the start of their formal proceedings but at the start of his presidency.