At 1:48 p.m. on October 23rd, Donald Trump posted a tweet that, in any other political moment, would be a strong contender for the worst public statement ever made by a President of the United States. Attacking enemies within his own party, Trump wrote, “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!”

But, of course, this is not any other moment. The Times has tracked hundreds of insults that Trump has already made since entering public life. He has called his critics “dogs,” “losers,” and “enemies of the people”; praised racists and trafficked in casual misogyny; derided people from nations he calls “shithole countries”; and labelled American cities where he is unpopular as rat-infested hellholes. This is not even the first time that Trump has used the word “scum”; in June, 2018, he referred to the lead F.B.I. officials who had investigated him as the “scum on top” of the agency. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that, with such a record, his Never Trumper tweet was not treated as major news (although a Republican House member from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, did say on CNN that it was “beneath the office of the Presidency”). Arguably, the tweet was not even his most offensive and inflammatory of the week, a distinction that might belong to Trump’s self-pitying, racially charged, and willfully ahistorical lament, from Tuesday, that the impeachment proceedings against him in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives amounted to “a lynching.” In some ways, these Trumpisms have become so abhorrent—and frequent—that it may be easier to ignore them than to contemplate them.

Still, the President’s “human scum” tweet bears noting. First of all, it is quite simply the language of tyrants and those who aspire to be tyrants. Hitler called his enemies human scum, and so did Stalin. In recent years, the Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as “the Trump of South America,” denounced refugees as “the scum of humanity,” and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, denounced Sergei Skripal, the former spy recently poisoned by Russian agents, in Britain, as a disloyal “scumbag.” The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, with whom Trump says he has a “love affair,” executed his uncle after a show trial in which he was called “despicable human scum . . . worse than a dog.” Kim’s regime, it should be noted, also called Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, who differed with the President on the subject of North Korea, a “bloodsucker” and “human scum.”

The other reason to consider Trump’s words this week is because of what is happening around him. In the twenty-four hours between Trump’s “lynching” tweet and his “human scum” tweet, William B. Taylor, Jr., the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, offered the most damning testimony against the President yet in the month-old congressional impeachment inquiry. Taylor, a Vietnam veteran and career Foreign Service officer, was called out of retirement by the Trump Administration to serve in Ukraine after the President fired the previous Ambassador at the behest of his private attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Taylor flew in from Kiev in defiance of a State Department demand that he not coöperate with the House probe, and he brought with him a fifteen-page opening statement, which offered specific, detailed evidence of the pressure campaign waged by Trump and Giuliani to force Ukrainian officials to investigate the former Vice-President Joe Biden, and which discredited conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. election. This campaign, Taylor said, included explicitly linking Ukraine’s willingness to undertake these investigations to nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance and a Presidential meeting. Trump even personally insisted that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, announce the probes himself, to put Zelensky “in a public box.” Committee sources told reporters that there were “gasps” in the room when Taylor testified. The diplomat was describing not one but multiple quid pro quos, in which Trump appeared to condition American assistance to a beleaguered, war-torn ally on actions that would be taken for his personal political benefit. Even the Senate Majority Whip, the Republican John Thune, of South Dakota, called the emerging picture “not a good one” for Trump.

The Presidential freakout of recent days can only be understood in that context. Trump is adjusting to a new political reality, one that is taking shape in a secure conference room on Capitol Hill, and it is a dangerous one for him: he now faces the very real possibility of impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, and just in time for the start of the 2020 election year.

For the first thousand or so days of the Trump Presidency, it has been a near-certainty in Washington that Trump might someday be impeached in the House, but he could never be convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate. And by near-certainty I mean as close to absolutely, a hundred-per-cent positive as is possible in an uncertain world. There might be one or two or five wobbly Republicans, it was believed, but never twenty—the number of votes needed to convict him, assuming all Democrats and Independents also vote for his removal. Essentially, the political world agreed with the premise of Trump’s tweet—that the Never Trump opposition to him within the Republican Party had faded to the point of political irrelevance, leaving those remaining against him within the G.O.P. an outnumbered minority, if not actually “on respirators.”

As a strict matter of numbers, that is still correct. Public polls have shown a dramatic increase in support for impeachment, but largely among Democrats and, increasingly, Independents. Most surveys now find a majority of Americans in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, but still the number is well below the percentage of Americans who disapprove of his performance as President. Even more significantly, Trump’s backing among Republican voters has yet to suffer much, with fewer than ten per cent of them—so far—saying they would favor impeachment. Republican members of Congress have largely held firm with Trump, too, though each day brings more examples of isolated individuals like Thune and Kinzinger publicly expressing concern. In terms of the Senate, the jury pool that may ultimately be called on to render a verdict on Trump in the Ukraine affair, most Republicans have either stayed resolutely silent or ostentatiously demonstrated their loyalty to Trump. Mitt Romney has been the only Senate Republican to forcefully question Trump’s actions. When Trump furiously attacked Romney over it, not a single one of his Senate colleagues rose to his defense.

And yet something does feel different around Washington. Republicans, and not just Trump, seem visibly nervous. “This is shaping up to be a very dark moment for the Trump White House,” a Republican source close to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the National Journal Hotline’s Josh Kraushaar. Even the Senate vote in an impeachment trial shouldn’t be taken for granted, the source said. “It’s getting to be a harder choice for more people. Whether that’s enough for enough senators to take decisive action . . . every single move has been in the wrong direction” for Trump.