AT A PRESS conference just over two weeks ago, Donald Trump could not have been clearer. His call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was “perfect...There was no quid pro quo.” In other words, Mr Trump may have asked a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, but it was a simple request. He did not make military aid conditional on it. Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s vice-president, was quick to back him up. “There was no quid pro quo,” he told reporters. “There was no pressure.” This is an odd defence, because it implies that asking a foreign government for help in winning an election is fine, yet it was one that the president’s supporters consistently repeated. Two events on October 17th made that line harder to maintain.

The first was testimony from Gordon Sondland, America’s ambassador to the European Union, before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry. Mr Sondland, a novice diplomat but generous donor, was, as he put it in an interview on Ukrainian television, “sort of overseeing the Ukraine-US relationship,” along with Kurt Volker, a Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations; and Rick Perry, the energy secretary.

That put some career officials out of joint. Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist who served on the president’s National Security Council until July, testified to the House committees earlier this week that she thought Mr Sondland’s inexperience made him a counterintelligence risk. Mr Sondland’s behaviour so worried Ms Hill and her former boss, John Bolton, then the president’s national security adviser, that they alerted White House lawyers. Mr Bolton strongly objected to the shadow foreign-policy that Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal attorney, appears to have been pursuing, with Mr Sondland’s help. “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney [Mick Mulvaney is Mr Trump’s chief of staff] are cooking up,” Ms Hill reportedly recalled Mr Bolton saying.

But Mr Sondland appeared to have one quality essential to survive in Trumpland: a willingness to defend the president. In a text message to Bill Taylor, America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, who worried that military aid was being made conditional on Mr Zelensky’s willingness to investigate Mr Biden, Mr Sondland wrote, “The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”

In his testimony on October 17th Mr Sondland was considerably less supportive of Mr Trump. He said he agreed with Mr Taylor “that President Zelensky should have no involvement in 2020 US Presidential election politics…Inviting a foreign government to undertake investigations for the purpose of influencing an upcoming US election would be wrong. Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong.” Mr Sondland said that he understood that Mr Giuliani wanted Mr Zelensky to make “a public statement...committing Ukraine to look into anti-corruption issues,” but that he did not understand “until much later, that Mr Giuliani’s agenda might have also included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate Vice President Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians, directly or indirectly, in the President’s 2020 reelection campaign.”

His understanding that there was no quid pro quo, he testified, came from Mr Trump. “I called President Trump directly,” he said in his opening statement. “I asked the president: ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’ The president responded, ‘Nothing. There is no quid pro quo.’ The president repeated: ‘no quid pro quo’ multiple times. This was a very short call.” In other words, Mr Sondland says that he just repeated what the president told him; he offered no further evidence of the statement’s veracity.

He also testified that Mr Trump had made Mr Giuliani a gatekeeper on Ukraine policy. “It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the president’s mind on Ukraine was Mr Giuliani,” he said. He thought this was a bad idea. “We were also disappointed by the president’s direction that we involve Mr Giuliani. Our view was that the men and women of the State Department, not the president’s personal lawyer, should take responsibility for all aspects of US foreign policy towards Ukraine.” And he testified that he did not know “until more recent press reports that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.” That stretches credibility. Mr Biden’s work with Burisma was the subject of lengthy stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker—the sorts of publications that a diplomat ought to read, or at least have aides keep tabs on.

The second event was a televised White House briefing with Mr Mulvaney. A reporter asked him whether the administration withheld military aid to Ukraine until Mr Zelensky investigated “the Democrats”—referring to a groundless, debunked conspiracy theory that a hacked server belonging to the Democratic National Committee is somewhere in Ukraine, and that some Ukrainians somehow helped Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Mr Mulvaney replied that, “what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation, and that is absolutely appropriate.” When the reporter pointed out that was a quid pro quo, Mr Mulvaney responded, “We do that all the time with foreign policy...Get over it.” Mr Mulvaney later tried to walk back the statement, but the damage was done.

It is true that foreign policy often has a transactional nature. Presidents have used White House visits as a reward for a foreign leader’s behaviour, for instance. And foreign aid often has strings attached. But there is a difference between using foreign policy to support American values, ideals and interests, and using it for a president’s personal political benefit. Mr Mulvaney—and perhaps Mr Trump himself—appears not to understand that distinction.

These events together leave Mr Trump and his defenders in an odd position. Having argued for weeks that there was no quid pro quo, the White House just admitted that in fact, military aid was held up because Mr Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate a conspiracy theory. Republicans must now defend that as acceptable behaviour.