What is a quid pro quo? [The New York Times]

Jon Allsop thinks about how the impeachment story might change now that it’s playing out on television. [The Columbia Journalism Review]

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

What’s new

Mr. Taylor revealed something important: a call, witnessed by one of his staff members, between Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, and Mr. Trump the day after his conversation with Ukraine’s president. Noah Bookbinder elaborates in The Times:

The staff member heard Mr. Trump ask Mr. Sondland about the status of “the investigations” — which witnesses have testified was shorthand for inquiries into the Bidens and the origins of the investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Taylor testified that his staff member heard Mr. Sondland say Ukraine was moving forward on those investigations and that Mr. Sondland said that the president “cares more about the investigations of Biden, which Giuliani was pressing for.”

That last quote is one you’re likely to hear again in the coming weeks.

The big picture

If the president were anyone else, the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argues, he would be fired and maybe even subject to a criminal investigation. Members of both parties should recognize, he writes, that the hearing only affirmed Mr. Trump’s use of federal office for political gain as “an outrageous abuse of power”:

The first witnesses before the impeachment hearings were two distinguished foreign policy experts with a long commitment to public service and no history of partisanship . … Their testimony was blunt. President Trump withheld not only desperately needed security assistance to Ukraine but also a White House meeting with the Ukrainian president — unless he committed to investigating the Bidens.

But The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues that American presidents have long conducted foreign policy in ways that serve their personal political interest, such as when President Barack Obama was caught in 2012 on a hot mic telling the Russian president to wait until after his re-election to negotiate contentious plans for missile defense systems. The board adds:

Appropriate requests to foreign leaders include reducing corruption, which was one of Mr. Zelensky’s campaign planks. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden don’t have immunity from such a probe simply because Joe Biden is running for office against Mr. Trump.

The sticking points

Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, hammered home a popular talking point within her party:

For the millions of Americans viewing today, the two most important facts are the following: Number one, Ukraine received the aid. Number two, there was, in fact, no investigation into Biden.

Yes, but the aid was released only after news of Mr. Trump’s withholding it broke, writes the Times’s editorial board. Plus, the board says, the idea that a crime is wrong only if it’s carried out successfully “has radical implications for America’s system of justice and overcrowded prisons.”

Another tack Republicans took was to dismiss Mr. Taylor and Mr. Kent as reliable witnesses because they were too distant from the president to offer anything more than hearsay. But the Times’s editorial board counters that “this wouldn’t be an issue if Mr. Trump were not obstructing the inquiry by refusing to allow White House officials, including the people who were on the call, to testify.”

In that regard, Neal Katyal writes in The Times, “President Trump is out-Nixoning Nixon.”

What the loyalists are saying

The president, for his part, called the hearings “a hoax.” That was the more concise cousin to Representative Devin Nunes’s extended metaphor comparing the testimonies to a “low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the Russia investigation.