Illustration by João Fazenda

Democrats in the House of Representatives voted last week in near-unanimity to adopt rules for public impeachment hearings; by doing so, they effectively bound their party to argue during the 2020 campaign that Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency. There are any number of bases for such an argument, but the House’s fast-track hearings will focus on the evidence about Trump’s abuse of his power this year with regard to Ukraine. The case has been marked so far by a certain Scorsese-scripted clarity, catalyzed by the published record of a July 25th telephone conversation between the President and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump infamously asked for “a favor,” by which he meant investigations of supposed ties between Democrats and Ukraine during the 2016 campaign, and of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who held a paid board seat at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company.

The upcoming hearings will explore more deeply Trump’s conduct before and after that call. Critical questions include: How did the nearly yearlong scheme to go after the Bidens, carried out by Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, distort and undermine U.S. policy toward Ukraine, an ally mired in a simmering armed conflict with Russia? And how rough were Trump’s tactics—that is, how explicitly did he make U.S. support for Ukraine conditional upon Zelensky’s willingness to aid his reëlection?

For weeks, the Democrats’ lead investigator, Representative Adam Schiff, of California, has been hearing testimony from diplomats and National Security Council aides in closed sessions. Its import has not always been easy to discern. The White House has thrown up as many obstacles to the investigation as its lawyers can conceive, and some current and former Administration officials summoned to testify have declined to do so. Yet a remarkable number of career public servants and political appointees in possession of detailed knowledge have defied Trump and come forward; the Times, the Washington Post, and other news outlets have published some of their written statements and reported on their answers under questioning. From this information we have a preview of what the public hearings are likely to reveal.

The available testimony makes clear that diplomats and N.S.C. officials working on Ukraine have been seething over how Trump and Giuliani jeopardized long-standing U.S. policy. As Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, an N.S.C. aide, put it in a statement submitted to Schiff’s committee last week, “A strong and independent Ukraine is critical to U.S. national security interests.” (Vindman received a Purple Heart for wounds he sustained while serving in Iraq; after parts of his testimony became public, the President denounced him on Twitter, and some of Trump’s allies on Fox News questioned the colonel’s patriotism.) Vindman and others who have testified describe themselves as fervent believers in the U.S. strategy in Ukraine, which predates Trump and enjoys bipartisan support; the policy seeks to bolster Ukraine’s economy and its military, on the ground that doing so is vital to Europe’s integrity and the containment of Russia. That so lofty a goal might be debased by Giuliani’s machinations to influence U.S. elections disgusted some of these officials. One of them, reportedly, was the hard-line former national-security adviser John Bolton, who, according to a statement from William Taylor, currently the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, referred to the tactic as a “drug deal.” Bolton has now been asked to testify.

The testimony to date has also clarified how Trump and his aides manipulated support for Ukraine. The Administration sent Taylor to Kiev with a letter that Trump signed on May 29th, which promised Zelensky a meeting in the Oval Office, as a show of political support. Then the Administration withheld that offer in the apparent hope that Zelensky would open the desired investigations. When that didn’t work, Trump proposed his “favor” in the July phone call. Zelensky still hesitated; over the next month, Trump tied his demands to the release of nearly four hundred million dollars in military assistance that is essential to Ukraine’s defense against Russia. (It had previously been known that, in mid-July, the President ordered Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, to hold back this aid, which Congress had already approved.) On September 1st, according to Taylor, Tim Morrison, an N.S.C. aide, told him it appeared that the aid “would not come until President Zelensky committed to pursue the Burisma investigation.”

According to Taylor’s account of another conversation with Morrison, on September 7th, Trump told Gordon Sondland, his Ambassador to the European Union, that, while he was not asking for a “quid pro quo,” he nonetheless wanted Zelensky to “go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016.” (Last week, testifying in a closed session, Morrison confirmed the gist of these discussions, the Times reported.) The next day, Taylor wrote, Sondland explained Trump’s thinking: “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something . . . the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.” Taylor replied that this “made no sense,” since “the Ukrainians did not ‘owe’ President Trump anything.” He added that holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was “crazy.” (Without explanation, the Administration released the aid on September 11th.)

In view of all this, Trump’s recent enthusiastic reliance on his base-rousing mantra “No quid pro quo!” is puzzling. The phrase’s simple meaning is “a favor for a favor”; it’s already clear that he sought such a trade, an egregious abuse of power. Trump seems to believe that if he shouts denials often enough and loudly enough the public will believe them. That the Trump machine’s torrents of populist propaganda may do more to persuade voters than any sober presentation of damning facts poses perhaps the greatest risk to Democrats as they take their impeachment investigation to the public.

The Ukraine story describes abuses of Presidential power that touch on a pillar of U.S. foreign policy in Europe. It is understandable that Democrats in the House believe they must follow the Constitution and consider an impeachment. It is also a political gamble. Trump is the opposite of a Teflon President; everything sticks to him, and yet he blusters on, unburdened by shame. For the Democratic Party, the road to Election Day, a year from now, still looks long and treacherous. ♦