The public hearings for Trump’s impeachment inquiry began in earnest today, marking the beginning of what is certain to be a brutal stretch for the embattled Trump administration.

The president’s Republican surrogates at the hearings came across as utterly inept, vacillating between incoherent mumblings and bargain rate conspiracy theories culled from the more deranged talking heads in Fox News’s stable. It’s only the first day of this public process and already the GOP has made it abundantly clear that they are utterly unequipped to offer even a semi-coherent defense of the president.

After the embarrassing performance by Republicans today, not even Trump’s favorite propaganda network can spin today as a win for conservatives. During an appearance on Fox News, former U.S. Attorney and current Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy broke down the day’s events.

Add your name to tell Congress to investigate Pence for his role in Trump’s Ukraine corruption. The VP is complicit!

McCarthy believes that Republicans have made a strategic error by trying to say that “nothing bad happened, it was perfect” about Trump’s now-infamous Ukraine call instead of taking a more moderate route and arguing that what Trump did doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense. By trying to completely whitewash his actions they’ve overplayed their hand.

“And as a result, I think we are going to have a very painstaking and maybe painful way, a kind of an itemization of a number of irregularities that happened and a lot of very admirable and articulate government witnesses getting on the witness stand to say, ‘This shouldn’t have happened, that shouldn’t have happened, this is a departure from American interests, a departure from American norms,” McCarthy predicted.

“Politically, I know I’m supposed to be the legal guy, but politically I don’t see how that helps the President,” said McCarthy. “It doesn’t mean he’s going to get impeached. But I’ve always thought, to the extent that you credit the idea that what the Democrats have wanted from day one is to paralyze and perhaps shorten the Trump presidency, and that the ultimate idea is to try to render him politically unelectable come the stretch run of the 2020 campaign, it seems to me that today is a good day for advancing that cause,” he added.

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Chris Wallace piggy backed on the point, reminding the conservative audience that the flawed rationale for the president’s defense — that “it was a perfect call… the president did nothing wrong” — was dictated by Trump himself, forcing his Republican enablers to argue a transparently false and ineffective narrative.

With more hearings scheduled for the coming days, things are likely to continue worsening for President Trump. He himself has run out of excuses and his party seems incapable of mounting any kind of real defense. Today was a bad day for the GOP and a great day for the Republic.

Check out the clip here.