With his brash manner, transactional rhetoric and background in hotels and real estate, Gordon Sondland has been seen as a mini-Trump in the world of American diplomacy.

As the U.S. ambassador to the European Union prepares to testify about his role in the Ukraine controversy, debate is raging over whether he will take the fall for Trump in a scandal on course to lead to the president's impeachment, or turn on the man who propelled him into a role for which his critics say he was unsuited.

"He was taking the spear,” said the Center for a New American Security's Jim Townsend, a deputy assistant secretary of defense under Barack Obama. “He's the loyalist, but also, he was the most naive.”

Sondland, 62, received enthusiastic support from Senate Democrats when President Trump selected the hotel mogul and GOP megadonor for the ambassador post.

“At a time when lots of politics is polarized and divisive, Gordon Sondland is going to be a really good fit,” Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said while introducing Sondland to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year. "He’s going to speak with real impact.”

This week, Rep. Earl Blumenthal, an Oregon Democrat, called on constituents to boycott Sondland's hotels until he testified before the House and handed over documents.

Sondland grew up in Seattle, the son of Jewish parents who fled the Holocaust. The Sondlands ran a dry-cleaning business and the future hotelier had a humble upbringing. He became a real estate broker and in 1985 started an investment group that acquired an old hotel, which became the Hotel Theodore, one of 14 boutique properties owned by Provenance Hotels, run by Sondland and his wife Katherine Durant.

The couple has a philanthropic foundation that has millions of dollars to organizations for causes including the arts and homeless people. In 2008, it gave $1 million for a fund that provides free admission for children to the Portland Art Museum. Although a committed Repulican, in 2002 he worked on the transition team for Ted Kulongoski, Oregon's Democratic governor-elect.

Now, some are castigating Sondland in a debate about whose reputation should suffer in the fallout from Trump’s request for Ukrainian officials to investigate his Democratic political rivals.

“He seems to have combined diplomatic incompetence and political hackery on behalf of the president's self-dealing, rather than carrying out his mission to advance the United States values and interests,” a Republican foreign policy expert who worked in George W. Bush’s administration told the Washington Examiner.

A Republican in strongly Democratic Oregon, Sondland reportedly renounced Trump during the 2016 election after the GOP candidate feuded with a Gold Star family. Once Trump was elected, though, Sondland reportedly donated $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee.

Sondland came into public view when Ambassador Kurt Volker, after stepping down last month as the State Department’s lead negotiator for the war in Ukraine, gave House investigators a series of text messages involving Sondland and others. In the text messages, Sondland told Volker and Bill Taylor, the career foreign service officer in charge of the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, that Trump “really wants the deliverable” before he agrees to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The texts make it look like he was pushing hard for Ukraine to do what the president has been accused of wanting it to do,” a former senior U.S. official, assessing Sondland’s messages on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “We saw three people in those text messages. One [Taylor] looked very good; one [Volker, looked] a little ambivalent; and one [Sondland], not so good.”

Others read in those messages the mistakes of a political and diplomatic novice at the center of a scandal. “Most people know if something heads south on you, you shut up, you go to ground,” Townsend said. “He was taking the spear when most people run away.”

As an inexperienced diplomat, Sondland was out of his depth, one observer said. “The campaign donor, political appointee ambassadorship system has given us some excellent ambassadors over the years and is worth preserving," the former Bush administration official said. "However, Sondland is exhibit A in all of the problems and risks and downsides of that system.”

Sondland might not have recognized the full import of Trump’s requests of Ukraine, said Townsend. “A lot of people who aren't in the business or aren't into governance and diplomacy, you ask them and they'll say, well, I don't see anything wrong with that,” Townsend said. "I think Sondland was like that. He's a new guy in this."