As a defense, though, it’s a bit lacking. It has swagger, certainly, but so do lots of guys who end up attracting unhelpful attention from the authorities. Mulvaney made a bad trade, undercutting Trump’s no-quid-pro-quo insistences for “deal with it” — a trade so bad that he tried to walk it back a few hours later. But the damage was done.

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Since news reports about Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden began to emerge, Trump and his allies have offered a broad array of rationales for the actions that have surfaced. The scattershot nature of those defenses has often had a see-what-sticks feel — and a lot hasn’t stuck. Not that this prevents Trump from using said defenses anyway.

We can categorize Trump’s attempts to disrupt the political damage of his Ukraine outreach into three groups: ones that have been debunked, ones that aim to deflect and ones that are little more than denials. Most center on Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint filed by a whistleblower in the intelligence community that discussed that call.

The debunked

The whistleblower got details of the July 25 call wrong. This is not true. It was not true last month, when both a rough transcript of the call and the whistleblower’s complaint were released; it is not true now.

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Arguments that the whistleblower was incorrect generally take two tacks. One is that the whistleblower missed specifics of the call. The other is that the whistleblower’s suggestion that the call included Trump pressuring Zelensky was inaccurate.

The complaint noted that the whistleblower was not on the call itself. The complaint articulates three components of the call: a request to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a request to investigate a server, and that Trump suggested Zelensky work with Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and Attorney General William P. Barr. Each of those things happened, even if the whistleblower mentioned “servers,” though Trump referred only to a server in the singular.

We’ll address Trump’s pressure on Zelensky below.

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The rules were changed to allow the whistleblower to file a complaint with only secondhand information. This is not true either. There was a period when the fact that the whistleblower largely relied on secondhand information was held up as evidence that the complaint should be considered untrustworthy, but that faded as it became obvious that the complaint largely comported with what was known. (The explosive assertion that the transcript of the July 25 call was moved to a highly secure — and private — system in the White House, for example, was shown to be accurate.)

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Trump allies then promoted the idea that the whistleblower depended on a change of the rules to file a complaint relying on secondhand information. The intelligence community’s inspector general then publicly refuted this claim — and noted that the whistleblower’s complaint included firsthand information.

There was no quid pro quo? Scattered reports before the release of the rough transcript suggested Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo in his efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Biden. The rough transcript didn’t show any explicit quid pro quo.

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But numerous people in the administration, including the acting ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, asked questions privately about the appearance of a quid pro quo. When Taylor raised the issue to E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Sondland replied that there hadn’t been a quid pro quo — though we then learned that he’d made that claim only after speaking with Trump. Sondland himself on multiple occasions suggested the existence of a quid pro quo, according to other officials, including in a July 10 meeting at the White House and an Aug. 30 conversation with a senator.

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The rough transcript, however, showed what Mulvaney alleged. Zelensky asked about aid (in the form of potentially buying new arms), and Trump responded with a condition: Investigate that server. That Mulvaney himself linked those two things makes it significantly harder to defend the idea that no quid pro quo took place — even though Mulvaney now rather clumsily insists the phrase shouldn’t apply.

Zelensky wasn’t pressured by Trump. Trump and his allies have seized on statements from Zelensky and the Ukrainian government downplaying pressure imposed by Trump. As we explained earlier this month, though, pressure is often indirect. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) summarized the inherent imbalance between the two countries in a speech: “There is an implicit threat in every single demand that a United States president makes of a foreign power, especially a country like Ukraine that is so dependent on the United States.”

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Regardless, we now know there was obvious pressure applied on Ukraine. Mulvaney’s not-a-quid-pro-quo involving aid is one. We know that Ukraine was flustered by the stoppage of aid. We know that Sondland was part of a team working behind the scenes to get a statement announcing new investigations that was used as a prerequisite for a Trump-Zelensky meeting. Pressure takes many forms, including ones that are subtle.

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The Democrats were shown to be wrong by the rough transcript. The release of the rough transcript came only after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced the launch of a formal impeachment probe. Trump has claimed the rough transcript then sent Democrats scrambling to rationalize her action. This isn’t true.

He also claimed last week that the transcript showed that Rep. Adam B. Schiff’s (D-Calif.) paraphrase of Trump’s call with Zelensky was shown to be false by the release of the transcript. That claim is undermined a bit by Schiff’s comments coming only after the rough transcript was public.

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But that’s a good point of transition.

The deflections

Schiff’s speech was a dishonest paraphrase. The president has repeatedly criticized Schiff for summarizing the July 25 call in a particularly unflattering (and occasionally unfair) way. To hear Trump tell it, Schiff’s rendition is one of the most dishonest things to have happened in the history of the House. Some people, Trump has claimed, think the July 25 call was bad solely because they heard and believed Schiff’s presentation.

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That’s pretty unlikely. Trump’s point here is pretty obvious: Make Schiff into the bad guy, the dishonest actor. Beyond Trump, very little attention has been paid to what Schiff said during a committee hearing last month. And Schiff’s comments, of course, have no impact on the underlying facts of the case.

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The whistleblower is biased. Republicans have repeatedly focused on reported bias on the part of the whistleblower as a rationale for ignoring what the complaint has to say. That bias is known because the original review of the complaint by the inspector general noted the bias, but only in vague terms. Since, there’s been a cottage industry of stories meant to offer additional insight into the extent of that bias.

The inspector general ultimately determined that the complaint was credible despite possible bias on the part of the author. And, again, the complaint has been shown to have been broadly accurate about issues that are now public.

The whistleblower might be a spy. Trump has repeatedly suggested that it’s important to identify the whistleblower. After all, the person could be a spy!

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See above.

The impeachment process is atypical and unfair. Much of the consternation expressed by Republicans and Trump center on an impeachment process that has progressed without a formal vote on the floor of the House. That claim, which is true, is then conflated with allegations that the process is therefore biased or unfair to Republicans.

Setting aside the important distinction between the process of investigating the allegations and the existing evidence bolstering the allegations, and additionally setting aside the distinction between the House probe and the seemingly likely Senate trial Trump could face — a trial where evidence will be presented and challenged — it’s generally true that the claims of unfairness are overblown. While depositions have taken place behind closed doors and are initiated at the direction of the Democratic majority, Republicans are given equal time to pose questions to witnesses.

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Joe Biden should have been investigated! This is one of the oldest defenses offered by Trump’s allies. Biden’s call for the firing of Ukraine’s general prosecutor was presented by Trump as linked to Biden’s son’s work for an iffy Ukrainian energy company that, Trump allies allege, was under investigation. That theory has been broadly debunked.

Trump defenders nonetheless argue that it’s appropriate for Trump to pressure Ukraine to investigate corruption and that a Biden probe would fit under that umbrella. The problem, of course, is there’s no evidence that Trump was interested in any purported corruption beyond that which focused on his potential 2020 opponent, including in his call with Zelensky. He said as much to reporters earlier this month.

What Trump and his allies want to do is deflect questions to their political adversary.

Ukraine got the aid after all. One defense of Trump potentially withholding aid to force investigations in Ukraine is that the aid ended up being delivered after all. We recommend against trying to avoid kidnapping charges by reminding the detectives that you returned the child safe and sound.

The Democrats are trying to overturn 2016/avoid 2020. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democrats want to impeach him because they are worried about beating him in 2020. This doesn’t make any sense; he’s regularly trailing leading Democrats in early 2020 polling, and removing him from office demands the unlikely support of 20 Republican senators. The 2020 election is winnable for Democrats. A removal vote probably isn’t.

This overlaps with claims that Democrats have been focused on getting him out of office since he won in 2016. That’s certainly true of Democratic voters but, again, has no bearing on the facts at hand.

Democrats were wrong about Russia, too. Even if it were true that the Russia probe hadn’t yielded any evidence of inappropriate behavior on the part of Trump, his aides or his campaign — which it isn’t — one is reminded of a little story about a boy who saw a wolf.

The point of that story isn’t that there are never any wolves.

The denials

The call was “perfect.” This claim, made frequently by Trump, can be evaluated on its own merits.

There was no explicit quid pro quo in the call and no admitted quid pro quo involving Biden. This is a bit of goalpost-setting, if not moving. The call clearly includes Trump asking Zelensky to look into two things that, if fruitful, would be politically useful to Trump. There’s a surfeit of evidence to suggest that Trump’s team withheld aid from Ukraine and withheld a meeting with Ukraine’s president while they tried to get Ukraine to launch the desired investigations. This argument is like demanding a smoking gun before initiating a murder charge.

Trump is allowed to ask for an investigation into corruption or the election anyway. This gets at the heart of Trump’s defense: What he did shouldn’t be considered wrong. This is, in essence, an appeal to the listener for exoneration, an appeal that Trump and his team can be confident will be embraced by much of Trump’s base and party.