It didn’t take long for the crazy to start. Even before the first two witnesses in the public impeachment hearings of Donald Trump had been sworn in to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday morning, the panel’s top Republican, Representative Devin Nunes, was going on about various conspiracy theories. First, he talked about a “three-year-long operation by the Democrats, the corrupt media, and partisan bureaucrats to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” A few sentences later in his opening remarks, he mentioned an alleged Democratic plot to obtain “nude pictures of Trump” from Russia. Soon after that, he blasted the Democrats for creating a “cult-like atmosphere” in their private depositions of witnesses.

None of it had anything to do with the matter at hand in the House’s impeachment investigation—President Trump’s pressure campaign to force Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit his personal political interests. Nor had a single word yet been uttered by either George Kent or William Taylor, Jr., the career diplomats who sat waiting patiently to testify in the storied but frigid House committee room, where the impeachment hearings—only the fourth in American history—will take place over the next two weeks. Still, Nunes attacked both their integrity and that of the State Department, accusing them of “undermining the President” “who they are supposed to be serving,” along with people in the F.B.I. and the Justice Department who launched the earlier Mueller investigation of Trump and Russia’s 2016 election interference. The message from Nunes was confusing, in that it did not make sense to anyone who had not been tracking the murky conspiracies reported on by Fox News and an array of conservative Web sites. But, at the same time, Nunes was making a simple, easily understandable point: This impeachment is a nefarious plot against the President. The details don’t matter, whether it be the specifics of “the Russia hoax” or “its low-rent Ukrainian sequel,” as Nunes called it.

But, oh, those details. There were many of them in the subsequent six hours of testimony by Kent and Taylor, and they are increasingly difficult for even Trump’s most ardent defenders to explain away. From the moment that the two diplomats were sworn in, soon after 10:30 A.M., it was clear they came from a different world than that of Nunes and Trump, a world where America’s actions have consequences beyond the public spectacle that our politics have become. Both Kent and Taylor appeared to have travelled to the hearing in a time machine from America’s recent past. They oozed rectitude and establishment expertise as they recounted their amazement and dismay at discovering Trump’s plot to withhold congressionally appropriated aid from Ukraine and a coveted Oval Office meeting from Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelensky, unless he agreed to investigations into the former Vice-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as a debunked conspiracy theory, à la Nunes, that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that actually meddled in the 2016 U.S. election.

Taylor’s voice bore such a resemblance to that of Walter Cronkite that the late CBS anchor’s name was soon trending on Twitter. Kent’s bow tie and three-piece suit seemed straight out of the Truman era. Both men insisted, with wonkish precision, on substance, offering a master class on Ukraine and the stakes involved in withholding American military assistance, as Trump tried to do, from a struggling democracy that has lost fourteen thousand of its citizens fighting Russian aggression on its territory. Taylor, who is now the senior diplomat in Kiev, since Trump fired the previous Ambassador this spring, spoke of visiting the Ukrainian front line in the Donbass, in Eastern Ukraine, just last week, on a day when one Ukrainian soldier died and four were injured. This is where the nearly four hundred million dollars in military aid that Trump held up was going.

Taylor—a silver-haired Vietnam veteran who had been called back into service by the Trump Administration and had reluctantly accepted an assignment he knew to be fraught with politics—looked and sounded like a Hollywood version of an American Ambassador as he recounted his own incredulous, dawning awareness of what he memorably called the “irregular policy channel” that took over from the regular policy channel in Ukraine at Trump’s direction. Partway through his opening statement, Taylor offered the major news of the day, revealing that one of his aides had come forward to tell Taylor about a call he had overheard between the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and Trump. The President could be heard inquiring about the investigations he had been seeking from Ukraine. After the call, Taylor testified, when Taylor’s aide asked Sondland what the President had said, “Ambassador Sondland responded that President Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden” than Ukraine.

It was powerful, serious, damning. Seven times in his opening statement, Taylor said that he found the events “concerning.” He called them “alarming.” He told one of his congressional questioners that he had never, in his decades in the Foreign Service, seen any other example of American policy being changed by a President in order to benefit his personal interests. And yet, somehow, the country still heard only what it wanted to hear. Many of those who watched were comparing Taylor with Cronkite, but the days when one gravelly-voiced anchor could shape how Americans heard the news are long gone. As Taylor read his testimony, MSNBC highlighted Taylor’s concerns about what he had called the “crazy” plan to withhold aid from Ukraine and his “clear understanding” of the linkage Trump had made between that aid and the investigations. On Fox News, meanwhile, a graphic simply displayed Trump’s talking points about Taylor, saying that the President had dismissed the diplomat, his own Administration’s choice for the job, as a “Never Trumper,” and noting that the White House had called his testimony “hearsay.” The Fox graphic made no mention of what that testimony was.

There seemed to be little appetite on the part of Trump’s defenders to actually argue the facts. Nowhere in his opening statement had Nunes so much as mentioned Trump’s case for himself, which is that his actions toward Ukraine were not only proper but “perfect.” As the rest of the long day wound on, not a single Republican made the case for Presidential perfection. Instead, they decided on a safer course: trying to convince the country to tune out. Taylor’s testimony wasn’t dramatic, they said; it was a snooze. At midday, the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, tweeted that the “sham hearing” was both “boring” and a waste of taxpayer money. Representative Mark Meadows, one of Trump’s closest allies, had been sitting in the committee room for the morning session, and he, too, came out to tell reporters that he didn’t think it amounted to anything. “I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to stay awake and listen to all of this,” Meadows said. Soon, Trump appeared before the cameras. First, he said that he was “too busy” to watch the hearings, then he proceeded to comment on them in detail.